Review of Full Metal Jacket (1987) by Bradysmith — 15 Jun 2013

Overrated is the word. Not bad. Definitely not bad, but it's quality degrades as the movie goes on. It starts out as a vicious, surreal, and engagingly strange vision when it's in the boot camp stage of things, but when the characters go to war it starts to fall apart.

You can definitely tell that it's a Kubrick movie. It has all of his signature style, such as his use of the wide angle lens and backwards moving cameras. But this movie can't escape its second half.

Its second half feels empty and lifeless. It also doesn't help that it ends on an anti climactic note. It starts out feeling like it's going to be something epic, but ends being contrived, and forgettable, and therefore Kubrick's vision loses most of its power.