About.com Rating
The best thing about "Jarhead"? Jake Gyllenhaal gets down with Naughty By Nature's "O.P.P.," wearing nothing but a Santa Claus hat. (Too bad the holiday cheer ends with latrine duty.) Anthony Swofford's autobiographical tale of a Marine sharp shooter during the first Gulf War, directed by Sam Mendes, offers some amusing anecdotes and a lot of narrative slack. Instead of "Semper Fi," the motto is "Hurry Up and Wait."
There are problems with all three acts of "Jarhead": the early scenes during Swofford's training are involving, but nobody will ever portray the dehumanization of boot camp better than Stanley Kubrick in "Full Metal Jacket." To try is to fail. In the second act, the marines move to Saudi-Arabia as part of Operation Desert Shield; the plot grinds to a complete halt. The soldiers hydrate, masturbate, play football wearing gas masks, and hydrate some more. By showing deadening boredom on screen, Mendes nearly bores his audience to death. Gyllenhaal, Jamie Foxx, and Peter Sarsgaard are acting their hearts out, but "Jarhead" has no momentum.
When Desert Storm finally rolls into Iraq for the final act, the audience and the Marines only get more indirection and disappointment. The oil fires are pleasantly surreal, and a group of crisp human corpses, lined up for a ghoulish desert picnic, drive home the horror. But there is no payoff: what should have been the film's climax putters out in a pitiful display of frustrated blood-lust.
The final scenes struggle to invest "Jarhead" with great gravitas. "We're still in the desert...," Swofford's voice-over intones. But nothing that has happened compares to the best films of the genre; Mendes' film doesn't convince. The best scene of "Jarhead" shows the hold the vastly superior "Apocalypse Now" has on the soldiers' imagination. (Both films were cut by legendary editor Walter Murch.) The story of a sharp shooter who doesn't get to fire a single shot might make interesting non-fiction, but for a movie, it's much too thin--no matter how good Gyllenhaal looks in that Santa hat.
