Full Metal Jacket: Review By Zak Lee Ferguson

Full Metal Jacket is one of Stanley Kubrick's masterpieces, but is it? Is it really? Well no, it isn't. Due to Kubrick's title, and own brand of sub-genre is it actual good, referring to your past films and duplicating shots that you have used time and time again. No, refer to them not re-do The Shining all over again. But when Kubrick sets out to work hard, and get a story out of it and earn an audience he does. Action is action, but when Kubrick films action it is tight, ham-fisted, fun, peculiar in style and form, but brilliant, and centring our leads in the mass destruction of it. It's got good pacing, but the first 40 minutes consists of shots that have been done and shown throughout Shining. Which to be honest isn't my favourite horror film to be branded, but also he's in a stage of his career where arrogance and being c*cky may seem like him just being proud of his past work and duplicating that, but me well I'm not shy to say that it's repetitive.

The film opens up where we meet our leads, we meet Joker (Matthew Modine) and 'Cowboy' (Arliss Howard), and the later on psychotic and obese Leonard Lawrence (Vincent D'Onofrio) who draws the wrath of Hartman, who nicknames him "Gomer Pyle". Hartman (R. Lee Ermey) is played out brilliantly, the highlight of the first 40 minutes where we meet these characters joining up to fight the Vietnam war. The line he utters, no shouts has true meaning, and a great message whether he was doing in spite of them or just a proud American

Most of you will go to Vietnam! Some of you will NOT COME BACK! But, always remember this - the Marine Corps lives FOREVER! And, that means you will live FOREVER! I don't know?! But this film speaks truth and is powerful in performances and story and everything else, what gets me in the hyped out lunacy of Kubrick. But throughout it knows where it wants to go, from the scene where the fat idiot Leonard has been caught out hiding tasty snack in his bunker, namely a jam doughnut, due to this incident they all have to do press ups while he scoffs his face. To then later on that night have the Marines get all their soups rap them in something g and beat him while someone holds him down, about perseverance, trust, namely strength.

Throughout you see Jokers status, his courage, how he enrols himself with his duties, to see his friend Cowboy, how to cope with his SPOILER* untimely death. It's a classic noir film, that has a maestro at the helm but if he were to play off it ore like his original war films, such classics and favourites of mine Paths Of Glory and Clockwork Orange, which were different at the time, for either of them, but here he's so self involved so, this is a Kubrick genre film where I get a script and make it Kubrickian. Maybe it's me, but it's still a strong enigmatic piece of film. The films core theme is strength, over your other companions and strength over psychosis and the Vietnamese, strength of the soul, passion of the art, fight the rights.

The acting is brilliant, all playing them off as archetypes but still keeping them centred in reality, the brilliance and key player of what sets the themes, and tones of this film comes from the masterful and brilliant (R. Lee Ermey) who shouts, screams, and embroils us in this world. It is witty, funny, but embroiled in the realistic side of life, its humour in the sense life is, its sad in the context of death and companion ship, it's just dramatically huge in a Kubrickian aspect and its a sheer strong film, juts testified by Kubricks love for being seen as a creator of a new genre, because you would try and use this new medium you have created but it's just larky and big up to me.