A good war movie, brought down by a lack of a center.

Rating: 8/10 (2 August 2006)

Stars: Mathew Modine, Adam Baldwin, R Lee Ermey, Vincent D'Orfornio, Arliss Howard and Kevin Major Howard.
Stanley Kubrick had already established that he was a prominent director in Hollywood that made really good films when this came out. This was a good movie. It wasn't great. The film is about the many adventures of Private Joker (Modine) as he goes through boot camp and goes off to the Vietnam War. The first 45 minutes are the intense boot camp program led by R Lee Ermey playing a heartless jerk, doing the best performance in the film. The second half of the film is Joker and his buddies at war, whether it be fighting, or playing around with the dead bodies. My problem with this movie, is there really is no plot or a center to it. It's just a big timeline of somebody's life that ends us wondering, "Well, what next?" However, Stanley Kubrick has a great war movie here and one of my favorite war films of the 80's.
My rating: *** out of ****. 115 mins. R for strong violence and language.