Vintage Clint Eastwood, as a tough Marine drill sergeant Tom Highway.

Rating: Null/10 (16 January 2011)

As I was watching this movie my immediate thought was "I wonder if his name was chosen because of the old phrase 'My Way or the Highway'?". I can't answer that but it sure seems appropriate.
I saw this on streaming Netflix.
We right away get a glimpse of the character Clint Eastwood plays in the opening scene when he and a bunch of others are in a jail holding cell, swapping stories. When a large, mean-looking guy comes up and says derogatory things about Marines, Eastwood gives it right back to him. When the mean guy tries to beat him up, he is subdued in a couple of seconds, then Eastwood goes right back to his stories.
He plays Sergeant Thomas Highway, a by-the-book, no-nonsense platoon leader who received a medal of honor many years earlier, in a battle few even knew about, at Heartbreak Ridge. But now he sometimes drinks too much, gets in fights, and is getting close to the mandatory retirement age. (He was actually about 55 during filming, and looked real good.)
So most of the movie is about Highway getting re-assigned to his former post and put in charge of a rag-tag platoon of men who were lazy, disrespectful, and hardly ready for possible battle. Which he does quite admirably. Lots of funny stuff in there also, and many great one-liners. Also, Highway's former wife, Marsha Mason as Aggie, still lived and worked in the community as a bar hop so they could rekindle their animosity towards each other.
I really like this movie, even though I waited almost 25 years to finally see it. After getting his men in shape, they were called to assist in a raid on Grenada, to recover a group of American students being held there. They turned out to become the heroes of the fictional invasion. There really was a 1983 invasion of Granada, to safeguard Americans living there during a coup.