Full Metal Jacket Review

The opening forty five minutes are as good as anything in the filmography. R. Lee Ermey, hired as a technical advisor and then cast after demonstrating that he could abuse recruits for fifteen minutes without repeating himself, improvised most of his own dialogue, and Kubrick shot the barracks in blown out white symmetry that makes the institution look like a machine for removing people. Vincent D'Onofrio's Pyle is a genuinely tragic performance, and the head shot in the latrine ends the section on a note the rest of the film has to live up to.

It does not quite. Hue City, built in a derelict English gasworks, is convincingly ruined but feels like a stage, and the second half becomes a sequence of patrols and a long sniper standoff that is powerful without being structured. Matthew Modine's Joker is an observer with an ironic pose rather than an interior, which leaves the film without a centre once Ermey is gone. Two unequal halves, and the strong one is unforgettable.