Full Metal Jacket Review (1987)
Director: Stanley Kubrick
Writers: Stanley Kubrick, Michael Herr, Gustav Hasford (based on Hasford’s novel The Short-Timers)
Starring: Matthew Modine, R. Lee Ermey, Vincent D’Onofrio, Adam Baldwin, Dorian Harewood, Arliss Howard
Release Date: June 26, 1987

Full Metal Jacket is two movies in one, and the debate about which half is better has been going on since 1987. In my opinion, having watched this a dozen or so times, the first half is the greatest thing Kubrick ever put on film, and the second half is a very good Vietnam movie that would be considered a classic in its own right if it didn’t have to follow something that good.

The film opens at Marine Corps Recruit Depot Parris Island, South Carolina, where a group of recruits arrive for basic training and immediately meet Gunnery Sergeant Hartman, played by R. Lee Ermey in a performance so authentic it redefines what the word means. Ermey wasn’t an actor. He was a real Marine Corps drill instructor who Kubrick cast after seeing footage of him screaming at people. There’s no performance here in the traditional sense. Ermey is just doing what he actually did for years, and the recruits’ reactions to him aren’t entirely simulated either because Kubrick wouldn’t let them rehearse with him and kept the cameras rolling. What you’re watching in those scenes is real discomfort channeled into something extraordinary.

Matthew Modine plays Private Joker, smart enough to survive Hartman’s attention by making him laugh when everyone else is getting destroyed. He becomes the audience surrogate, the sane voice trying to process an insane environment. Vincent D’Onofrio plays Private Pyle, the overweight recruit who struggles from the first day and becomes the focal point of the first half’s slow, inevitable tragedy. D’Onofrio put on seventy pounds for the role and gives one of the most unsettling performances I’ve ever seen in any film. Watch the progression in his eyes across the first half of the movie. There’s a point where something changes in them and it never changes back.

The climax of the Parris Island section is one of the most tension-filled sequences in cinema. Kubrick builds to it methodically, letting you understand exactly what’s happening and why before it does, and then it happens anyway and it’s still shocking. That’s great filmmaking. Knowing something is coming and still being blindsided by it when it arrives.

The second half shifts to Vietnam, specifically the Tet Offensive of 1968 in the city of Hue, and Joker is now a combat correspondent for Stars and Stripes, wearing a peace symbol on his jacket next to a Born to Kill slogan on his helmet. When an officer asks him what that combination is supposed to mean, he says it represents the duality of man. That exchange tells you more about what Full Metal Jacket is trying to say than any essay written about it. The film is about the simultaneous capacity for compassion and violence that exists in all of us, and the way military training specifically is designed to suppress the former and unleash the latter.

Adam Baldwin as Animal Mother, Dorian Harewood as Eightball, Arliss Howard as Cowboy; the ensemble in the second half is strong and the Hue sequences are gritty and claustrophobic in ways that feel genuinely dangerous. The sniper sequence near the end is one of the most tense and morally complicated stretches in the film, and Kubrick doesn’t offer you a clean emotional resolution when it ends. That’s deliberate. The film isn’t interested in making you feel better.

Does the second half match the first? No. That’s not an insult. Almost nothing in cinema matches what Kubrick did with Ermey and D’Onofrio on Parris Island. The second half is very good on its own terms, and the two halves connect thematically in ways that reward multiple viewings. But if you’re being completely honest with yourself, the moment the film leaves Parris Island you feel the shift. You’re watching a great Vietnam movie now instead of something that might be the greatest forty-five minutes Kubrick ever directed.

That said, the whole film together is still a four-star achievement and essential viewing for Memorial Day.

Full Metal Jacket gets a four out of five: COMMENDABLE.

Full Metal Jacket comes in at #6 on my Top 10 Movies Worth Watching This Memorial Day Weekend article. If you like this one, check out my review of The Longest Day, which was #7 on the list, or check out the debut of The Cutting Room editorial looking at Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey. More Vietnam war movie reviews are coming throughout the week.

Agree, disagree, or think I got it completely wrong? Say so in the comments or over at the Vortex Effect forums.