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Jarhead

Mixed or average reviews
Based on 40 critic reviews
How did we calculate this?
Based on 132 votes
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Movie Info
Genre(s): Action | Comedy | Drama | War
Written by:
William Broyles Jr.
Anthony Swofford (book)
Directed by: Sam Mendes
Release Date:
Theatrical: November 4, 2005
DVD: March 7, 2006
Running Time: 115 minutes, Color
Origin: USA
Summary
RATING: R for pervasive language, some violent images and strong sexual content
Starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Jamie Foxx, Peter Sarsgaard, Skyler Stone, Wade Williams, Katherine Randolph, Chris Cooper, and Lucas Black
Laced with dark wit, honest inquisition and episodes that are at once surreal and poignant, tragic and absurd, Jarhead is the film adaptation of Marine Anthony Swofford's bracing memoir that took readers into his disorienting firsthand experience in the Gulf War. (Universal)
Also On Metacritic
FILM: American Beauty Road to Perdition
Also On The Web: Internet Movie Database View The Trailer Official Studio Site
What The Critics Said
All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...
Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold
The sum of the movie is devastating. One takes out of it a sense that the human cost of our endless adventure in Iraq is going to be incalculable, perhaps catastrophic -- a psychological time bomb that will be exploding for decades to come.
Read Full Review >Charlotte Observer Lawrence Toppman
It's a unique vision of war from the point of view of a Marine who never pulled a trigger against a foe.
Read Full Review >ReelViews James Berardinelli
Jarhead is about how the experience of being in the military fundamentally changes an individual. In this case, the focus isn't about the madness of slaughter in the jungle, but the madness of inaction in the desert.
Read Full Review >Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert
It is not often that a movie catches exactly what it was like to be this person in this place at this time, but Jarhead does.
Read Full Review >Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman
Jarhead isn't overtly political, yet by evoking the almost surreal futility of men whose lust for victory through action is dashed, at every turn, by the tactics, terrain, and morality of the war they're in, it sets up a powerfully resonant echo of the one we're in today.
Read Full Review >The New Republic Stanley Kauffmann
The daring achievement of Jarhead is that it is not a film about war, about combat: it is about being a soldier.
Read Full Review >San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle
A harsh and thoroughly unromantic examination of the scarring effects of war.
Read Full Review >Rolling Stone Peter Travers
Even when the script slips into sermonizing -- a Swoff voice-over informs us that we're all still "in the desert" -- Mendes keeps invading us with emotions. The jolt of Jarhead is undeniable, and it comes when you least expect it.
Read Full Review >Philadelphia Inquirer Steven Rea
They're all dressed up to kill, with no place to go.
Read Full Review >USA Today Mike Clark
What we're left with is solid if not exceptional, though it's good to see Mendes expanding as a filmmaker.
Read Full Review >Portland Oregonian Shawn Levy
The result is typical Mendes: accomplished, calculated and uncommitted. Maybe it's because his talent comes to him too easily, but I've yet to sense his heart and soul in a film.
Read Full Review >Film Threat Pete Vonder Haar
Jarhead does feature stunning visuals. Mendes and cinematographer Roger Deakins have created some fantastic imagery.
Read Full Review >The Onion (A.V. Club) Scott Tobias
Screenwriter William Broyles, Jr., a former Vietnam pilot and "Newsweek" editor, connects reasonably well with the material, but "American Beauty" director Sam Mendes has a tendency to smooth out the rough edges, and the film goes flat as month-old soda.
Read Full Review >Dallas Observer Robert Wilonsky
It may feel familiar, but it's a bleak and profound piece of work.
Read Full Review >Christian Science Monitor Peter Rainer
Despite all the heavy artistic artillery Mendes has brought to bear, his movie isn't all that far removed conceptually from "Top Gun" - which was also about military men itching for a chance to rock 'n' roll. The only difference is, "Top Gun" was unabashedly a popcorn movie while Jarhead is a box of unpopped kernels passing itself off as a full meal.
Read Full Review >Austin Chronicle Marc Savlov
This is a war film with precious little war, which was also the crux of Swofford's book.
Read Full Review >TV Guide Ken Fox
Viewers hoping for a brutal, pitch-black war comedy along the lines of M*A*S*H are in for a major disappointment.
Read Full Review >Boston Globe Ty Burr
All writers are entitled to tell the story of their own war, whether it's on the battlefield, in their head, or -- as is usually the case -- somewhere in between. Like it or not, Anthony Swofford did just that. Mendes, by contrast, tells the story of a Hollywood war, and it's simply not the news we can use.
Read Full Review >The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Rick Groen
The result is a war picture that, trying to pass off fidelity to the book as objectivity, sacrifices any voice of its own, and ends up not knowing what to think.
Read Full Review >Newsweek David Ansen
It's an expertly made film that, scene by scene, holds your attention. But both emotionally and intellectually, it doesn't add up.
Read Full Review >Empire Colin Kennedy
While not quite the war movie that many of us were hoping to see right now, Mendes’ dispassionate take on the first Gulf War has many merits, and it does bring vividly to life the peculiar dilemma of the modern soldier.
Read Full Review >Washington Post Stephen Hunter
What's so good about the movie is Gyllenhaal's refusal to show off; he doesn't seem jealous of the camera's attention when it goes to others and is content, for long stretches, to serve simply as a prism though which other young men can be observed.
Read Full Review >The Hollywood Reporter Kirk Honeycutt
Jarhead refuses to engage in its own point of view toward events it depicts. So the film feels empty and tentative, uncertain of what if anything these events add up to.
Read Full Review >Variety Todd McCarthy
Part absurdist drama, part personal observational commentary and part hormonal explosion, all seen through the filter of previous war pics, Sam Mendes' third feature has numerous arresting moments but never achieves a confident, consistent or sufficiently audacious tone.
Read Full Review >New York Magazine Ken Tucker
As a result, Jarhead is utterly predictable (boys endure tough training; boys encounter another culture and are baffled), studded with first-rate performances.
Read Full Review >Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow
Caught up in its own macho symbolism, Jarhead fights a losing battle to show the human cost of warfare.
Read Full Review >Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez
After an hour of being stranded among these restless soldiers and their increasingly aggressive locker-room antics, you, too, will be longing for combat -- for anything -- to happen.
Read Full Review >Salon.com Stephanie Zacharek
Mendes doesn't care about people -- he's too busy making his art. And with Jarhead he pulls off, effortlessly, what so many pro-and antiwar individuals since Vietnam have tried so conscientiously to avoid: His movie is antiwar and anti-soldier.
Read Full Review >Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern
An exercise in inertia about an exercise in futility.
Slate David Edelstein
"Three Kings" is fictional, obviously, and Mendes and Broyles were bound by the facts of Swofford's life. But the violence in "Three Kings" was visceral, whereas Jarhead's never penetrates the blood-brain barrier. It's locked away in its narrator's jarhead.
Read Full Review >Premiere Glenn Kenny
That Jarhead is an impressive technical achievement is a given, but ultimately this picture is the last thing any war movie should be: innocuous.
Read Full Review >The New Yorker David Denby
Has an oddly amorphous and inconclusive feeling to it. We never do find out who Tony (Jake Gyllenhaal) is, and his best friend, Troy (Peter Sarsgaard), who shifts back and forth between sanity and hysteria, is a mystery, too.
Read Full Review >LA Weekly Scott Foundas
Curiously, Jarhead transforms Swofford himself (played by Jake Gyllenhaal) from the book’s duty-bound youth, desperate to live up to his father's military legacy, into an enigmatic voyeur whose feelings and motivations are rarely made clear.
Read Full Review >The New York Times Dana Stevens
Mr. Swofford's book has earned a place alongside the classics of military literature, but Mr. Mendes's film is more like a footnote - a minor movie about a minor war, and a film that feels, at the moment, remarkably irrelevant.
Read Full Review >Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan
As much as we intellectually admire Jarhead, it's a cold film that only sporadically makes the kind of emotional connection it's after.
Read Full Review >Village Voice J. Hoberman
One of the few Hollywood movies to ever acknowledge the Desert Storm "experience," Sam Mendes's Jarhead is both fastidiously grueling and perversely withholding.
Read Full Review >New York Daily News Jami Bernard
The movie has some of the washed-out look of David O. Russell's excellent "Three Kings," but none of the edge. That's part of the point - that nothing leads to anything, at least not in this particular war.
Read Full Review >New York Post Kyle Smith
Marines did not play football in full anti-chemical suits in 112-degree weather; men would have been collapsing and perhaps dying because it was so hard to breathe in the gas masks. Do I quibble over details? Details are all the movie offers. There isn't a story.
Read Full Review >Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum
Jarhead virtually begins with a rip-off of the basic-training sequence that opens Stanley Kubrick's "Full Metal Jacket."
Read Full Review >What Our Users Said
The average user rating for this movie is 7.0 (out of 10) based on 132 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
Jeroen V. gave it a9:
The actors are great, the music is great, the atmosphere is great and the movie is great.
Adam gave it a9:
I have read several of the reviews that have been written about this movie and it seems that most of the complaints are that marines wouldn't act that way or that it wasn't action packed. Well, I have had many discussions with Marines that were actually there and for the most part everything that happened in that movie was accurate. The only scene that was confirmed from the veterans that I talked to was the movie that contained a unfaithful wife. Even though that scene wasn't fully confirmed, some of the veterans did actually hear about things like that happening, so I would suspect that it is possible that actually did happen. Now in regards to the action, the Veterans that I have spoken with saw very little to absolutely no action during the war. It was not a bloody war like World War II or Vietnam. It was mostly fought by tanks and aircraft, as depicted in the movie, the ground forces saw almost nothing but the aftermath of the tank's and aircraft's devestation. Looking at this movie as it should be looked at, especially since the original book that the movie was based on was written by a Veteran of the war, this movie is amazing. Watch this movie if and only if you want to see a great depiction of what actually went on in the desert during that unfortunate conflict.
Sandwich gave it a3:
It kept my interest, if only because I was hoping for a scene or maybe a line that would get me thinking. It never did. Visually, it was well done. Intellectually and story-wise it was complete garbage.
Steve W. gave it an8:
i clapped at the end of this movie - i thought it was interesting in not following a predictable script and faithful to the plethora of information that was in the book, i think those who read the book would appreciate the movie better. And yes the detailing of male sexuality in the military is not for everyone's delicate ears, but it happens and probably a lot more obscene than this.
Joe gave it an8:
Talk about missing the point. In an age of hi-tech weaponry the soldier's role is something of a grey area - a point the film makes with some visual muscle.
Guy! gave it a0:
This movie wasn't funny or exciting, it was DISGUSTING!!!!! Are marines really that obbsessed with sex?!?! Plus: this movie goes nowhere, it just takes place in a camp where nothing happens. I watched this movie hoping for something like Saving private Ryan or WIndtalkers, and I got the story of a pack of wild animals living in the desert. Don't make the same mistake I did, and don't watch this movie.
Steve T. gave it a0:
This movie is boring. I had more fun when I got my wisdom teeth pulled.
