Full Metal Jacket: Critic Reviews

No one who sees Full Metal Jacket will easily put the film's last glimpse of D'Onofrio, or a great many other things about Kubrick's latest and most sobering vision, out of mind.

Kubrick's harrowing, beautiful and characteristically eccentric new film about Vietnam, is going to puzzle, anger and (I hope) fascinate audiences as much as any film he has made to date.

Although the elements of the story are simple and precise, Kubrick infuses a dreamlike, fatalistic quality.

Full Metal Jacket, ice and wildfire, order and chaos, is intellectual war, hard thought.

[A] strangely shapeless film from the man whose work usually imposes a ferociously consistent vision on his material.

This is the most tightly crafted Kubrick film since Dr. Strangelove, as well as the most horrific; the first section alone accomplishes most of what The Shining failed to do.

An intense, schematic, superbly made Vietnam War drama.

Full Metal Jacket is not a realistic film -- it is horror-comic superrealism, from a God's-eye view -- but it should fully engage the ordinary movie grunt.

Extremely graphic, violent Vietnam War film.

It still stands as a timeless meditation on war and its effects.

Less about the Vietnam War than about how the Marine Corps turns its recruits into killers.

Visually poetic, darkly humorous, uncompromisingly brutal, and subversive in every way, Full Metal Jacket is easily one of the best war movies without being remotely similar to your standard issue war flick.

Kubrick seems to be directing his vision beyond the reality of the Vietnam War to issues far more universal and timeless.

Bleak but darkly funny at times.

A hardy Kubrikian effort that warms on you with repeated viewings.

That first half is jaw-droppingly good.

...Kubrick's notion of how the military changes ordinary people into killing machines.

The best American cinematic critique of the Vietnam war

Kubrick's direction is as steely cold and manipulative as the regime it depicts, and we never really get to know, let alone care about, the hapless recruits on view.

...uses a full range of cinematic language to comment on an institution that "eats its own guts" as it destroys foreign cultures.

Though shot in the U.K. and thus lacking authentic look and feel, Kubrick's contribution to the Vietnam War films is a powerful chronicle of the military as a bureaucracy that turns young innocent men into machine-like killers.

Kubrick's bleak anti-war satire is surprisingly conventional in form, but rolls like thunder in stretches.

Not Kubrick's best, but often powerful, particularly for R. Lee Ermey's performance.