Jarhead is definitely not a bad movie at all, unless you suffer from bipolar disorder, which 75% of the internet seem to proudly display. It starts out like it's got the makings of being an incredible film, as it follows the trail of an enlistee and the trials that he goes through being a new guy. I wish his drill sergeant would have been in the movie for longer than just the beginning, because he was a hoot.

I guess I can understand some being upset that there really isn't any action, and you would think that more character development would be the reason for the sacrifice of action, but I felt it came up a bit short there, too, but the characters were still engaging enough to hold interest, the movie just didn't go too deep into exploring any of them. Maybe if one of them had died (in battle) or if friendships were more solidly played, it would have worked better for me in that regard, but the main character of this piece was the war itself, and it was painted in the most unglamorous and unhollywood style it could have been, because it was a realistic portrayal, and that means that not much happens other than waiting for something to happen, as the marines tried to entertain themselves and keep from going stir crazy in the process.

The acting was all fine, especially Jamie Foxx, who was always entertaining when he was in a scene. The main problem with Jarhead is probably that it's not hollywood enough. It's too realistic of a depiction for conditioned moviegoers who are wanting explosions and who want to see the enemy slapped around. The enemy did get slapped around, but the unit that the movie is focused on wasn't involved in any of that.

B

I enjoyed it, but the material just never let it rise to greatness. The opening scenes and subsequent boot-camp tutorials are really well done and entertaining. I especially liked it when the recruits were going wild during a screening of Apocalypse Now. You could sense the unbridled enthusiasm and testosterone. They were literally chomping at the bit to get their slice of some action, not knowing the frustration they would soon face. Jamie Foxx is crackling in these scenes and throughout the whole movie, but Jarhead belongs to Gyllenhal, who gives a terrific performance.

Once the movie reaches the desert it begins to meander a little and while still interesting, there was no real poignancy or excitement and no great dialogues save for a very tense moment between Swofford and Fergus. I wanted to know more about Troy and Fergus, but instead we get a few too many moments of Foxx giving his men shit, or various other comedic moments set to some cute musical cue.

I suppose it was kind of a fresh take on things with the fresh-faced youngsters thirsting for battle, who end up bored and on edge and uncertain about their enemy. When they finally get a whiff of some actual combat, the damn war is over, which leads to the film's best scene where the marines release all their pent-up aggresion and fire their weapons into the sky while Public Enemy's Fight the Power blares in the background. The final scenes play out as a kind of harsh reality check. It was sad to see that Troy had died, not guns blazing on the battlefield, but by who knows what back in the real world.

Jarhead was nicely shot. There are a handful of magnificent images (trucks seen through the heat waves, oil fields at night, Troy and Swofford coming back to camp at night over the sand dunes) and Mendes did a fine job with everything else. It's not that the movie needed some giant battle sequence or anything, since it would have ruined the whole point, but I just think the characters we spent the movie with weren't all that engaging and the ones that were weren't explored in enough detail. Maybe this works better as a book and not as a major motion picture.

B

JARHEAD (2005)



This was a simply amazing movie! It surpassed all of my expectations and delivered in every way possible. It definitely isn't the quintessential war movie that some might be expecting. It isn't excessively violent and the battle scenes aren't dominant here. Instead, this is a hilarious, dramatic and fascinating portrait into the lives of the men who protect our country. And yes, I said hilarious. I was surprised to find myself laughing out loud during several parts of the film. It feels really realistic and the screenplay is to thank for that. In no way is this film censored, for it features some of the crudest and funniest lines of the year.

The acting is fantastic and is one of the driving forces behind the film. Jake Gyllenhaal deserves an Oscar nomination for his portrayl of Anthony Swofford. His character was a hard one to pull off, but he does it with flying colors and delivers a knockout performance - one with lots of depth and emotion. It is the best male performance of 2005 to date, and it has confirmed Gyllenhaal's place on my list of the best actors working today. The supporting cast is also great. Peter Sarsgaard is excellent as the distant Troy and Jamie Foxx is a scene-stealer as the no-holds-barred Staff Sgt. These three actors should definitely be recognized for their fine work. The rest of the cast is solid, but no performance measures up to these three.

The direction by Sam Mendes is another reason this film excels. The way the film is shot is wonderful and it has some of the best cinematography of the year. Some of the images are very powerful and will be hard to forget. I also thought that several techniques he used worked very well. A standout scene is the one where Gyllenhaal stands there hearing nothing but the wind as the first battle finally occurs. Mendes has proven himself once again to be an excellent director and has delivered his finest piece of work since American Beauty.

Overall, this is an absolutely brilliant film with amazing performances and a unique vision. Definitely one of the year's very best and one of the best war-themed films ever made, JARHEAD is not to be missed.

10/10 (A+)

Nice!

JARHEAD



There's not much to director Sam Mendes' (ROAD TO PERDITION) JARHEAD, a Desert Storm-themed film based on the writings of marine Anthony Swofford (Jake Gyllenhaal, PROOF). It's not a war film about epic battles or complex politics. It's about grunts who, while in a vast desert in the Middle East waiting to go to war, fret over their girlfriends cheating, hold wild parties, and go mad waiting to shoot an opponent. In the end, the hero, Swoff, returns home without ever shooting his rifle in battle, but the experience changes him forever.

I've read the still-controversial publication this movie's based on and I loved it. Swofford's musings on the first Gulf War and his role as a ground soldier in it are fascinating and, considering the current war in the same region, important. But it is a novel about men doing nothing and becoming crazier and crazier as each non-violent, still-waiting second passes. As result of this, I was unsure if Mendes and screenwriter William Broyles Jr. (THE POLAR EXPRESS) could pull off a film adaptation without the result being a total bore. Having seen their film, I can confirm the two talented men came together and created a solid movie which almost, but not quite, succeeds in adapting a novel which seemed unadaptable.

Much of the film's success is owed to the cast, who're so compelling and dedicated watching them do noting is often entertaining. Comedian-turned-acclaimed thespian Jamie Foxx (STEALTH) is great as Swofford's caring, but no-nonsense Staff Sgt., delivering a performance which is both amusing and powerful. Also stellar is rising talent Peter Sarsgaard (FLIGHTPLAN) as a dedicated, routine-loving marine who becomes more and more unsure of himself and his profession the more time he spends in the desert. In a cameo is Chris Cooper (ADAPTATION.) as a head honcho who delivers a speech to the marines upon their arrival in Kuwait. Cooper should've been in the movie more, but he is a powerhouse in this scene. But the title is singular and the star jarhead of JARHEAD is Gyllenhaal, who has found the perfect role, a role which allows him to show off his movie star charm, but also his amazing understanding of understatement and overwhelming emotion. He sells this character and the wide range of emotions with the ease of actors twice his age.

On a visual level, Mendes is a master. JARHEAD is just more proof of this, as Mendes' urgent handheld camera style, bleached-out vistas, and wonderful use of subtitles all join together to create a beautiful, harrowing portrait of Desert Storm. If you're not haunted by the shots of Swofford and his team wandering through the desert, a desert on fire with burning oil wells, you must've left the theatre for the entire final act. A beautiful film. Broyles Jr. also puts on a good show, offering a surprising amount of humor in what might've become a morbid, grim downer. The rub is with the pace. Mendes and Broyles Jr. aren't sure how to surpass the long stretches of nothingness and, despite their best attempts and those of the amazing cast, the film does have moments of tedium.

In multiple respects JARHEAD reminds me of Peter Weir's Russell Crowe-led seafaring epic MASTER & COMMANDER: THE FAR SIDE OF THE WORLD. The wars depicted couldn't be more different in time or setting, but both films have brief spurts of action and are more interested in examining the lives of the warriors. Weir's film is better, with more beautiful visuals and stronger performances, but JARHEAD has more than it's share of great moments and, in the end, you'll leave feeling you've seen a great depiction of a jarhead's life. If you want to know what those grunts with high-and-tight haircuts did while sitting around in the desert, I recommend this strange, hard-edged, and well-made film.

B+

A-/B+

I went in knowing the theme is nothing happened, and I came out very satisfied. 80% of the film are close to greatness. The ending was unnecessary, and the film lost some focus in the middle as it tried too hard striking the notion of boredom and the story became repetitive itself (how many times it needs to talk about masterbation or getting a hard on), but overall, it's quite enjoyable. As people said, it had a lot of humors, although it definitely borrowed some of them from Full Metal Jacket. The cinematography was somewhat bland at the beginning but outstanding afterward. Performance wise, Jake is the real standout for me. Peter, unfortunately, for the second movie in a row, wasn't given much to work with. He only had one showy scene, toward the end when he and Jake finally got the order to kill an enemy. Foxx, as their leader in the movie, got a lot of chances to showcase his skill, and I think he pulled off fine, but not award-worthy, even though it's the kind of character that gets award attention.

Dissappointing. The movie was about nothing, it isnt a war movie, its not a political movie, its not even a movie with a moral message. So what is the movie about? To me it seems to me like a bonehead entering into the military, he gets into some sort of frat initiation, misses his girlfriend and wonders if she is cheating on him, has some hijinks and fun with his collegues, goes to armed combat, blanks out, never shoots anyone, blanks out again, goes back home and finds out his girlfriend is indeed cheating on him. The End. Jarhead offers nothing new or fresh in terms of war movies, it basically plays out like a boot camp training movie in some sense the same way as Stripes does. To me its just a boot camp movie that throws in a few jacking off jokes and soldiers just behaving like frat boys.

C/C+

This review is kind of scatterbrained:

The theme of nothing happening didn't bother me, but the characters never really connected on any level. I think I would need a map to figure out where Swofford was coming at in any moment. First he didn't want to be in the Marines, then he did, then he felt bad, then he felt good... it got tiring. Perhaps the lead character's indecision fed into the movie's confusion. Without that sense of consistency I couldn't make heads nor tails of anything.

He tells us at the beginning and the end that he is "every Marine" yet he spends the bulk of the movie setting himself a bit apart from other Marines and how he never got to see action (or I should say... not very much action). If what we have to learn from this is that these guys were bored in the desert and are upset because they didn't cut some heads off of some Iraqis... how do we sympathize with that? What does Mendes want from us as an audience?

The scene that crystalizes this is the Apocalypse Now scene, when they are in the movie theater. You would think that someone who read Camus would grasp the irony of cheering on while the soldiers gun down the Vienamese village in that scene, but not Swofford, he's "one of the good ol' boys" until the screenplay wants him to take a turn.

Sarsgaard seems to be typecast these days, although he's not bad. I like the Texas hick who turned out to be much more intelligent than anybody imagined, and Jamie Foxx was tremendous as the staff-segeant.

Gyllenhaal was okay. I don't necessarily blame him as much as I do the wacky screenplay.

Overall, it went nowhere, and that's it's sin. It's not a sin because it's "boring" or there is no action, it's because this film really tells us nothing about the Marines or the Gulf War or ... well... anything really.

BTW... could Sarsgaard have said "Welcome to the SUCK" any more times? I counted 4.

D

Welcome to the suck.
Save your money and just watch the trailer over and over again.

I thought it was one of the best movies of the year. Full of intensity and adrenaline. Splendid movie. A

Had a feeling you would like it.

I'm actually surprised she liked it that much since it was a testosterone masturbation fest of a film.

It's not like this was Stealth or something.

It's not some piece of shit action garbage, it was actually quality.

Oh, sorry, I didn't mean for that to come off disrespectful or anything, I just meant that it was such a "macho" type of movie that I was a little surprised that you loved it so much. I would have expected you to like it, just not your 3rd favorite film of the year.

I'm glad you enjoyed it so much.

Welcome to the Suck, indeed. The film was pointless, which I guess may be the point but still makes for a mostly dull movie. Easily Mendes' worst effort after the stellar one-two punch of 'American Beauty' and 'Road to Perdition.' The film had good cinematography but that's about it. Basically every character was unlikeable and Jaime Foxx is just about the most annoying actor alive. He's obviously so full of himself it even comes across on screen. I hope he rebounds with something fantastic, maybe working with Kevin Spacey again since Spacey kind of needs a boost to his career right now.

C-

Kevin Spacey will get plenty of a career boost playing Lex Luther in the next Superman film, don't you think?

I don't know if he will. Even if it's successful (which is likely), no one is going to say he had anything to do with it. It's not the kind of career boost he probably wants. He needs to do a more "serious" film to have the chance to win another Oscar.

Almost every single negative reaction to this movie is the same, everyone is disappointed by a lack of violence and action.

Given that this is a movie about the Gulf War (where less than 70 Americans died total), how much action were you honestly expecting?!

Who said anything about us not liking it because of the lack of action? The characters were unlikable, their minds are basically set on them debating who can jerk off the most, being dicks to their fellow soldiers after learning one of their wives was cheating on one of them. The movie tries to be like Deer Hunter but at least in Deer Hunter which is also a war movie that also lacks any action, we actually care about what happens to the characters and feel sadden about what happens to their lives after the war. Jarhead is NOT the Deer Hunter.

I liked it, and don't understand why anyone wouldn't like it, which I said in my review. I do understand people being disappointed in the lack of action, though, because there really wasn't much character development that took the place in it. If there had been more of that, I would have gladly gave it an A, too, but it came up short there, and came up short in the action, so that was my only issue with the movie and why I feel it failed to reach greatness. I couldn't see the justification in sacrificing the action.

People here? Every negative review?

I didnt read the reviews but so far me and Joe are the two people here who dont like the movie and we listed our reasons. Almost all the characters in the movie are dick heads especially the main guy for threatening to shoot his fellow soldier because he goofed up on his watch. There also was no storyline either, it never discusses the issue of the Gulf War nor does it take any side. By the end of the movie, there wasnt even a message delivered about the movie, its just about some boy entering war and doesnt get to kill anybody and then the end

andaroo mentioned that he didn't like that aspect of it. So did I. The negative reviews seem very focused on that aspect, which is part of what I believe she was talking about.