The Anti-Climatic War-Movie

Rating: 5/10 (5 January 2009)

Sam Mendes third feature JARHEAD is full of everything in war we usually don't see, and that's interesting - we've seen inner-conflicts, we've seen the acid, we've seen the molesting and all that stuff before, JARHEAD goes its own way and with Sam Mendes on directional duties it oughta be great! Well, it isn't.
Jake Gyllenhaal stars and looks just as bewildered and frustrated as any American boy fed on Apocalypse Now oughta be, and Gyllenhaal doesn't become the star of the show, instead he becomes one of the many, frustrated young men who came to the Desert Storm not really knowing what was going on, who had imagined something that really never existed. It's Jamie Foxx as Staff Sgt. Sykes that truly shines, he is a developed piece of armory that brings more to this than the usual complexity of serving a country you don't know what stands for.
There's dusty production design in this, and the movie feels frustratingly difficult to enjoy before half way through, that's when Roger Deakins really steps in. The cinematography of JARHEAD is truly memorable, oil-shining and gas-fueled this feels like a meltdown of drained emotions towards a coda of questions not answered. It really could have become something terrifying and provocative. Sadly, the tacky screenplay with Gyllenhaal doing even tackier voice-over grabs the movie by it horns and slows down something that could have ended much better than it began.