Watch Ishtar instead. Welcome to the suck.

Rating: 1/10 (13 March 2006)

Good message, good visuals, good cinematography, terrible movie. This is the first movie I have ever rated a 1, and I hate to do it, because I don't like to think that there are movies this bad out there. The first thing about this movie to jump out at me as being inexcusably awful was the script. The script was not just poorly written, but it's completely unoriginal. From the get-go, we hear lines straight out of Full Metal Jacket, some word-for-word, some just copied with a change of words. Examples: "You... like old people f*ck!" Also how the drill instructor grabs the guy's neck and shoves him on the ground. Another copy from Full Metal Jacket is when the main character goes nuts and recites "This is my rifle..." The same thing happens to Private Pyle, he recites that line, kills his own guy, then turns the gun on himself. The only difference here is that the trigger isn't pulled. The latrine burning scene was copied from Platoon. Not to mention a two-minute scene from Apocalypse Now. Camels are also shot in Three Kings. The plot is inexcusable. Why are the small group of Marines marching through the desert in the middle of the night by themselves? This could only happen in Hollywood. Scene transitions are pathetic. The plot doesn't flow. The military behavior, such as the commander taking the time to argue with the main character's sniper partner while in the middle of calling in coordinates for an air strike, seems to not be realistic. The last scene, in which the two walk over a hill and are all of a sudden back at base camp, is hard to believe, as is everyone firing their guns into the air. What is the point of the movie? The ideas that the half-war is frustrating to the Marine Corps grunt and that war is pretty crazy do not take another feature-length movie to be understood. Lots of things just don't make sense and are evidence of a relatively thoughtless story. For example, the main character tells the drill instructor that his dad only talked about Vietnam once, and therefore convinces him that he is genuine. However, when we see his dad, he is wearing two dog tags at the kitchen table, which runs contrary to the idea that he was not open about it. This is simply careless movie-making. What is a horse doing in the middle of an oil field? It's a stunning image, but it doesn't make any sense. It seems like the creators of this movie thought that having Sam Mendes as director and producing artistic visuals in reference to the Iraq conflict would make people oblivious to the fact that the movie sucks. Apparently it worked on most of you people enjoying your dunk neck-deep in the excrement of popular mass media.