Full Metal Jacket: Kubrick's The Shining

I was fully prepared to love “Full Metal Jacket.” I just watched Kubrick’s “The Shining,” and was hungry for more from the ingenious director. Plus, the genre of war films is one of my favorites, so I was excited to see this landmark. “Full Metal Jacket” isn’t the high mark of the limited oeuvre I’ve seen from Kubrick, but it’s still a very good movie.
“Full Metal Jacket” is told through the eyes of Pvt. J.T. ‘Joker’ Davis (Matthew Modine), a Maine Corps recruit. Viewers see Joker go through a brutal boot camp, led by Gunnery Sgt. Hartman (Lee Ermey), along with fat screw-up Pvt. Leonard ‘Gomer Pyle’ Lawrence (Vincent D’Onofrio) and Pvt. Cowboy (Arliss Howard). After basic training, we follow Joker during a tour of Vietnam.
One of the flaws with this very good but certainly imperfect film is the lead performance by Modine. He’s serviceable in the role, performing capably. But that’s about it. He doesn’t do anything especially noteworthy with his acting, and he does nothing to make the part his own. This performance is indistinguishable from if any other equally unskilled actor played the part. Simply, Modine does what he has to, but he never impresses.
The supporting cast is much better than Modine. D’Onofrio is very good as the …show more content…
The first portion of the film, the boot camp scenes, feel very different than the combat scenes that make up the larger segment of the picture. Those boot camp scenes are by far better, making this divide more noticeable and problematic. One of the reasons for this is that the loose narrative structure employed during the training is merely a nagging issue, but in the Vietnam section it becomes a full-fledged flaw as the latter hour of this movie is just a collection of set pieces that help Kubrick convey his