Stay away from this.

Rating: 4/10 (17 November 2009)

This is not a good movie on any level. It isn't funny. It isn't educational except in a very juvenile way, and it certainly isn't worth the ticket price. George Clooney was good, I will give him that, but as for the other actors... what happened? You could tell they were sorry to be in the film. I think what looked good on paper became a disaster in production.
My problem with this movie is three fold. The pacing is slow, the characters are mostly cardboard, and the story line is pretty boring. There were three good laughs that were okay, but two shock scenes that they should be ashamed of. There's nothing funny about presenting facts about past events where someone was killed or maimed due to another persons abject stupidity.
There are certainly facts here (things based on mistakes made during the Vietnam war) that can shock a few people who don't remember or never heard of the drug culture of the 60s. But overall it's just military bashing. There is no story. This is just an array of mindless skits and ignorant plot points.
It's easy to make fun of the military for their past mistakes, but the writer of this film had the advantage of hindsight to slap them around with. How many mistakes are we making now? Depleted uranium? Defective flack jackets? Would anyone be justified in making fun of soldiers who died defending this country?
Lastly, the final scene was meant to redeem the insults, but it fell far short. No amount of camera trickery can remove the bile flung at the military and those few who were misguided in their methods.