'Jarhead' is a big gulf with no war

Instead, Mendes co-opts the craziness of other directors, other movies. He shows the soldiers whooping it up in the barracks as they watch "Apocalypse Now." (The sick joke here is that, primed for war, they celebrate a classic antiwar statement). He also stages a boot camp scene that is virtually lifted from Stanley Kubrick's "Full Metal Jacket," and he makes passing reference to "The Deer Hunter." All of which serves to point up how conventional "Jarhead" is. One movie that is conspicuously unreferenced is David O. Russell's powerful 1999 Persian Gulf black comedy "Three Kings." No point in making yourself look bad.

Because the ground operations in the Persian Gulf - unlike the "surgical" air strikes - rarely made it onto the nightly news, "Jarhead" for awhile has the force of revelation. But very soon the action devolves into horseplay and hollering. None of the characters, including Swoff, ever really comes into focus.

Gyllenhaal has a marvelous affability, and in a scene near the end where Swoff snaps and almost throttles a fellow recruit, he reveals how terrifying this movie might have been. But Mendes doesn't really know what to make of Swoff, a fresh-faced kid who reads Camus and believes himself less than a man because he hasn't killed. Most often, Swoff's odyssey is simply rendered as standard-issue coming-of-age stuff. Was Mendes afraid to show us more of the malice lurking inside the all-American boy-next-door?

Occasionally a sequence or a piece of acting hits home. The soldiers' trek through a landscape of burning oil wells and charred bodies, with an oil-soaked horse suddenly emerging from the smoke, is appropriately ghastly. (The corpses are like infernal sculptures). Sarsgaard, in a thinly written role, does well as a soldier for whom the war outside is a mere mirror of his inner one. But except for Gyllenhaal and Sarsgaard, the acting is surprisingly unsurprising, which doesn't jibe with Mendes's reputation from "American Beauty" as an actor's director. (But then again, I always thought that movie was wildly overrated.) Jamie Foxx, as usual, is a powerhouse, but he never seems to be onscreen long enough.

The wartime climate we now live in has given us new eyes with which to watch war movies. This makes it all the more regrettable that "Jarhead" is so old-style. Because Mendes is not interested in bringing any contemporary relevancy to the material, it's difficult to shake off the notion that "Jarhead" is hugely irrelevant.

I wouldn't feel this way if Mendes had dug deep inside the psyches of these men or given us fresh images of the horrors of war. 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. Grade: B-

• Rated R for pervasive language, some violent images and strong sexual content.

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