Film Review: Jarhead

It's on general release at the moment. Here's my impression:

Director: Sam Mendes
Cast: Jake Gyllenhaal, Jamie Foxx, Peter Sarsgaard.

Memoirs of a Jarhead. Gyllenhaal plays an often distant (or just plain blank in a Matt Damon way) recruit in Uncle Sam's Marines. It starts with a tirade of shouting by the drill instructor and threatens to never end as Foxx harangues the sniper unit into shape ready for Gulf War One and the Kuwait theatre and continues to follow the "jarhead" to the end of Operation: Desert Storm.

Mendes is a skillful director and though slow in parts he has created velocity enough to penetrate initial reticence. It's all psychological depravation punctuated by group dry humping in preparing for the invasion. The actual battle scenes and action is very limited and occurs near the end - so in those respects it may be closer to the autobiography it is based on than any conventional war movie - perhaps a sort of American Das Boot.

Sarsgaard's character begins to flip out too and the bond between the pair grow when they finally see combat and that relationship is tested amongst the unit as the morality of some of their individual actions are explored. But for all the realism - and some scenes were horrifically enough presented to almost smell the cordite - the tale was too slow burning. As a comment on current American foreign policy, or war doctrine, this film does not confront directly: it is first and foremost one man's account. If only that man didn't have such a dumb facial expression.

It's around the 3 out of five star mark. Don't get me wrong - it has it's moments: the characters get well developed and you feel for their fates and there are moments of real poignancy; but this was never going to be All Quiet on the Kuwaiti Front. It is personal and modest and we don't see the other side except for miles of charred corpses.