Heartbreak Ridge: a musical comedy aboutÂ…. U.S. Marines

Rating: 4/10 (19 November 2005)

Folks, I shouldn't even be here. I should be dead -- dead from laughing so hard at this uber-silly movie, that is. Hey, can a person actually die laughing? Don't know, but this movie surely would be a great way to test that question.
An aging Clint Eastwood, playing a discipline-challenged U.S. Marine Corps gunnery sergeant named Tom Highway (as in, "it's my way or the Highway"), gets a new lease on military life by being assigned to lead a bunch of Marine recon soldiers who are even more lacking in the discipline department than he is. The premise is so unrealistic it defies belief. The thing that strikes me is that every one of them Â– Eastwood's gunny sergeant included Â– should have been mustered out of the Corps a long, long time ago. But had that happened, we wouldn't have a movie now, would we?
So what we get is a movie that is so silly, so unashamedly ludicrous ("The Dirty Dozen" and "Major Payne" come to mind), that it actually had me glued to the tube just to see how far they were going to go with it. They went pretty far. All the way to Grenada and back. It was just layer upon layer of war-movie clichÃ©s, stereotypes, funny names, oddballs in uniform, snappy one-liners, military jargon and crude language, all against a backdrop of a Marine Corps that could only exist in some sort of mystical alternate universe (I think that place is known as Hollywood). *Note in the trivia section that both the U.S. Army and the U.S. Marine Corps disavowed this film.
All said, though, I actually recommend this movie! So bad it was... really bad, but hey, it was still quite funny and should be especially amusing to those of you who were ever in the service. I myself was in the Navy - the parent company of the Marines, BTW.
I would love to watch this movie in a room full of current and former grunts Â– especially the Recon types. I bet the laughter would be excruciating. Incidentally, after seeing this movie, I'm wondering why the U.S. Marine Corps even has to bother with recruiting drives. Why are they always begging for "a few good men" when it's obvious that the U.S. Marine Corps is actually just one big laugh riot? Who knew?? I'm surprised people aren't joining up in droves.