Decaffinated Full Metal Jacket with no point!

Rating: 2/10 (13 November 2005)

What is this film about? We follow a recruit played by Jake Gyllenhaal who has buffed up his body (apparently at the expense of his brain) as he goes through basic training, through to his deployment in the desert during The Gulf War. What I have liked about Gyllenhaal in the past was he didn't come across as a vapid pretty boy. He always showed intelligence and wit even in minor crap like The Day After Tomorrow. That is missing from his character of Swofford in Jarhead. Here, he just comes across as a good-looking piece of thick-witted man-meat.
This is not to say the real Anthony Swofford, whose book this film is based on is a dope; it just shows that the choices the filmmakers have made are dopey. We begin with voice over narration from Gyllenhaal's Swofford and we are meant to see this world through his eyes, but the filmmakers think that if they give him any kind of strong opinions, ideas or emotions, we in the audience will be alienated. I think they are wrong.
I was alienated by Gyllenhaal being such a blank slate. I don't mind characters in movies having definite points of view, even if I disagree with them. The one time Gyllenhaal's Swofford shows any humanity or spirit is when he threatens another Marine while reciting his "Rifle Code" and then asks the other Marine to kill him because he's bored. But like many others in the film, this scene goes nowhere.
By the time of that scene, I had already given up on Jarhead; mostly for depicting things that aren't believable. For example, during the basic training sequence, they show a recruit being killed by LIVE FIRE. Yes killed, not by heat stroke or a heart attack (which DOES happen) but being KILLED BY A RIFLE SHOT IN THE HEAD. Do the Marines really use live rounds during this type of training? Perhaps they do, but even the Marines don't like to see their recruits killed stateside during training. There would most definitely be hell to pay if that happened; yet Jamie Foxx's instructor just shrugs this death off, like it happens every day. He even yells at the dead recruit as if it was his fault for getting shot. Has this ever happened? If so, were there no consequences? Any of us who saw that situation developing would have called CEASRE FIRE! But Foxx didn't.
I've been in the service and I went through basic training and I know The Air Force would not have tolerated this. Foxx would have been removed from command and probably Court Marshaled. Later, another Marine kills some camels and then abuses an Arab corpse and we are told by Jamie Foxx (who was in command when the recruit got shot) that the Marines are "not like the Army" and they don't put up with that. Not put up with shooting a camel, but shooting a human recruit in the head during basic is OK? This is ludicrous, even for the Marines with their misplaced pride in toughness over intelligence.
In another scene, the Marines watch Apocalypse Now and they cheer and mimic the actions on the screen like an audience at a midnight showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show (they're even dressed like the movie characters, but that is coincidence). I don't doubt this happens, but what is the point of the scene? Doesn't any Marine recognize that Apocalypse Now is ridiculing the very same macho attitudes they are cheering about?
What am I to think when Lucas Black gets some hot crude oil in his eye and panics and has to be held down while his fellow Marines wipe the burning oil out of his eye? Wouldn't regular oil workers do the same if one of their co-workers got oil in his eye? Wouldn't you do the same if a co-worker got some WhiteOut in their eye at the office? What's the point here?
Jarhead plays like a decaffeinated version of Full Metal Jacket. In that film, we also followed a Marine recruit through Basic Training and then to war, albeit the Vietnam War. But, Kubrick's film showed the psychological devastation of what being trained to kill does to a basically decent person, but what is Jarhead saying? That if you train Marines to kill, you better let them kill or they'll be really angry? In the film, they reiterate the Marine mantra that the "most deadly weapon in the world" is a trained Marine. Not true. My vote is for the Hydrogen Bomb.
Is some statement being made about preparing guys to kill and then, at just the moment they are about to kill, you take it away from them? If there is a big meaning to this, I missed it. All in all this film just dragged on and on without any kind of statement or story. The usually good Jake Gyllenhaal was saddled with nothing to do but show off his newly acquired buff body and having him dream about vomiting sand does not constitute character insight.
The only interesting parts came from the supporting characters. Peter Sarsgaard once again does that magical alchemy of making something out of nothing (see Garden State and Kinsey) and Lucas Black is fine as the grumbling, but intelligent Marine who constantly questions his orders. The smart and sexy Lucas Black is just waiting for a role that will define him as an adult actor the way Sling Blade defined him as a child actor. I hope he gets it soon.