Movie Steak

The obvious reason to see this movie is that it was directed by Sam Mendes who also directed American Beauty and there is a fantastic film if there ever was one. I didn’t actually realise is was when I headed off to see it though. Interesting trivia fact huh? Here’s another, we couldn’t get seats together so we just sat in the aisle ;). But enough about my sad life at the movies, I have a review to do here.

If for some reason you don’t think the fact that Sam Mendes directing the film is enough to warrent a viewing then how about Donnie Darko himself, Jake Gyllenhaal starring in the film. And he’s good. Really good. The whole Jarhead thing breaks with his Donnie Darko look but by the end of the film you can see the Donnie look re-emerging.

The film manages what very few Hollywood films can achieve, American Beauty being one of the major acceptions, in avoiding any real kind of categorisation. It’s a war film but the lead character never actually kills anyone. Indeed, once they get shipped out to the middle east he never even fires his rifle until the very end. And to boot there are plenty of commedy momments thrown in but while these are funny they don’t detract from the seriousness of the movie.

It’s clearly a war film in theory - after all, it’s about the Gulf war. But when you get past that shell it is more of a drama. Yet not a drama about becoming a marine and going off to fight (well it’s sort of about that). So genre categorisation is hard to apply in this situation. Which is always a sign of a job well done by the filmmakers.

A lot of the critics reviewing this movie did some lengthy talking about the messages behind this film. To be honest, I think they are over-analysising it a bit. I don’t think it has some kind of big political message behind it, rather it’s about the characters than the plotline. The plotline itself is a little generic, a marine who turns out to be a hot-shot shipped out to the frontline. But it’s not about that, that’s just a backdrop.

It’s not going to go down in history as a great war film but any film narrated by Jake Gyllenhaal and directed by Sam Mendes gets my vote. It’s way more of a guy movie than for girls I think but most adults should enjoy it.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 16th, 2006 at 3:51 pm and is filed under Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.