Jarhead Review

Roger Deakins photographs the Kuwaiti oil fires as a black noon, and a horse slicked head to hoof in crude, wandering out of that smoke, is the image nobody forgets. Sam Mendes made a war picture about men who never get to fight, which is honest to Anthony Swofford's memoir and costs the film its engine. The strongest scenes put nothing at stake but morale: the barracks screening of Apocalypse Now, where Marines cheer the helicopter attack like a recruitment reel, and the Christmas party that turns on a loaded rifle and a stupid dare.

Jamie Foxx supplies the one man entirely at home, a staff sergeant who has found the only place that fits him. Peter Sarsgaard is better still, all flat calm until the aborted sniper shot, when he begs an officer for permission to do the job he trained four years for and is refused. Thomas Newman's score holds the desert together when the script will not. The narration, though, is where the film thins out, a deadpan that flattens the movie rather than the war, and the long middle stretches meant to convey boredom succeed at it too completely.