Overrated

Clever, believable, and super fun to watch. It totally has replay value.

Just intense enough to provide a much-needed diversion, just lightweight enough to make you forget about it soon after it’s over. It’s not exactly “good,” per se, but it does what it sets out to do in terms of putting us on edge, which makes it … successful?

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

Stanley Kubrick is hit or miss with me and this one is a hit. The 1st half of the movie when they are in basic training is an easy 10 stars but once the movie transitions to the Vietnam War itself, it falls flat at times. The movie is a quote machine especially from R. Lee Ermey's iconic drill sergeant character with stuff like:"Your ass looks like 150 pounds of chewed up bubble gum""5'9"??? I didn't know they stacked sh!# that high""Give your heart to Jesus but your asses belong to the Marine Corp"But the quote that would be his demise was the infamous "What is your major malfunction numbnuts?" The rest of the film is following Private joker as he photographs the war. I see it as anti-war film with Kubrick showing how the military turns people into killers and then just the brutality and horrors of war. He does all of this this with a kind of twisted sense of humor.

A pragmatic U.S. Marine observes the dehumanizing effects the Vietnam War has on his fellow recruits from their brutal boot camp training to the bloody street fighting in Hue. Full Metal Jacket depicts War and the troubles that Marines go threw every day and with a talented director behind camera such as Stanley Kubrick the movie definitely brings on emotion but also war to it's purest form. As far as perfomances go i think all the actors did pretty good but Vincent D'Onofrio's Pvt. Pyle is the stand out perfomance of the film sure he has a small screen time but the man does a great job and the same goes for R. Lee Ermey, definitely a War movie that i can recommend easily for anyone.

I suppose your assessment of Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket depends largely on how you see the relationship between its two halves: the first set in a South Carolina training camp where a group of newly-recruited Marines are belittled and terrorized by their drill sergeant; the second following a couple of the characters to Vietnam, to be belittled and terrorized by the war itself. The first time I saw the film, the transition seemed jarring, but over time I've come to see it as validating the sergeant's tactics as much as damning them. Of course his relentlessness makes them tougher, but Kubrick pushes the abuse into the realm of twisted poetry and mythmaking, into an exercise in fictionalizing oneself (no one ever gets called by their real name) and then wearing that fiction like a full metal jacket. If Matthew Modine's character "Joker" copes best, it's perhaps because of his head start on such a project with his dumb John Wayne impersonations and smart mouth. In Vietnam, working for the Stars and Stripes newspaper and chafing at its mediocre reporting values, he craves greater engagement, then gets a dose of it, and in his final voice over is retreating back to the imagined, to the world of the sergeant's invented "Mary Jane Rottencrotch," and thereby finding a measure of peace, even of satisfaction. Given time, he might retreat even further, maybe into a photograph as at the end of The Shining; the interiors in the first half of Full Metal Jacket often feels like it might have been shot in some of the back corridors of the Overlook Hotel, and the second half might just be taking place inside a more cunning and noisy metaphysical maze. Whether it's an "anti-war" film seems somehow like the wrong question; any attempts even to engage with it - as in Joker's simultaneous wearing of a peace symbol and a "Born to Kill" slogan on his helmet, explained as some kind of comment on the "duality of man" - seem draining and futile. As such, the film, even if it's not one of Kubrick's very best, is an astounding exercise in strangifying.

A smart move from the legend that was Stanley Kubrick. We've all seen many war films, a genre that is well explored from a variety of different conflicts. Full Metal Jacket however chooses to go behind the scenes and focus on the training process that changes well intentioned men into trained lethal killers. You could easily split this in half and have two separate films, the first half being more psychologically charged whereas the latter showcasing the brutality of warfare. A ridiculously serious drill sergeant practically bullying a trainee marine so harshly that it slowly turns him into an unstable psychopath. That right there, was some really good psychology and made the film so much more interesting. Sure the Vietnam War scenes were depicted with a substantial amount of fire, blood and guns but it was the first half that really captivated me. Vincent D'Onofrio was the stand out for me, both convincing and expressive through his face. Matthew Modine was good, probably his best performance. Lee Ermey deserves recognition just for somehow managing to not lose his voice from all the shouting. Characterisation was present, perhaps not fully fleshed out as I would like but was just enough for me to care about them. Yet again though, it's the technical marvel that wins...Stanley Kubrick. His directing style is so damn flawless. The nice clean long takes, actors looking directly into the camera, slow motion deaths (particularly in the sniper shootout)...he is just phenomenal. Script was sharp as well. A great section of dialogue where our lead character wears a peace badge and a helmet that says "born to kill" for which he describes represents the duality of man. That really stuck with me. So whilst it might feel like two separate films (due to that ridiculously quick transition), it's hard not to appreciate everything that's shown to us. Another hit from Mr. Kubrick.