Poorly executed war drama that try's to be too many things at once.

Rating: Null/10 (22 November 2014)

The soldiers who served in the Vietnam war first had two traumatic experiences to face: Getting past the excruciating boot camps and not dying in battlefield. Legendary director Stanley Kubrick makes a poorly organized film that is more of an ill-matched compilation of two situations revolving around these two difficult paths in the Vietnam War. Hiring a real-life Drill Sgrt, Kubrick seeked R.Lee Ermey to scare the heck out of numerous amounts of soldiers in a boot camp. We spend way too much time here. None of the soldiers are three-dimensional, Vincent D'Onofrio keeps being traumatized by everyone, and this aspect of "Full Metal Jacket" should have been played as just an exposition rather than an entire half of the film. None of the characters change in a moving way. The performances get tired fast. The second half is about the soldiers from this platoon shooting their way out in Vietnam. While Kubrick does do a decent job portraying the hardship soldiers have to go through like almost every other war filmmaker has, Kubrick doesn't make this a compelling story. We get to see some undeveloped soldiers shoot around and go through a couple situations before the story cuts. This isn't a story. It is an examination of two aspects of Vietnam. Having both of them in the same film is ambitious, but both scenarios don't parallel or correspond with each other. It feels like two films put together, making Kubrick fail in his ambition. This film tries to blend forced black-comedy with choppy war scenes that have horrible editing and sound. The war scenes are not compelling at all do to no suspense what so ever and blandly executed energy from Kubrick. The slow-motion aspect doesn't work in this film either. It kind of makes it strange. "Full Metal Jacket" is an all over the place war film that plays more like a one-layered tough situation for characters we barely know.