Jarhead

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle

A harsh and thoroughly unromantic examination of the scarring effects of war.

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.

Philadelphia Inquirer Steven Rea

They're all dressed up to kill, with no place to go.

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.

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.

Film Threat Pete Vonder Haar

Jarhead does feature stunning visuals. Mendes and cinematographer Roger Deakins have created some fantastic imagery.

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.

Dallas Observer Robert Wilonsky

It may feel familiar, but it's a bleak and profound piece of work.

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.

Austin Chronicle Marc Savlov

This is a war film with precious little war, which was also the crux of Swofford's book.

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.

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.

Chicago Tribune Allison Benedikt

Inner dialogue is a hard sell on screen.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow

Caught up in its own macho symbolism, Jarhead fights a losing battle to show the human cost of warfare.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum

Jarhead virtually begins with a rip-off of the basic-training sequence that opens Stanley Kubrick's "Full Metal Jacket."