At the beginning of A FEW GOOD MEN, we see a certain Private First Class Santiago get assaulted at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, and a rag gets stuffed in his mouth, by the Marine equivalent of two "junior lieutenants" (actually a Private First Class like Santiago, and a Lance Corporal). Said underlings are assigned Lt. JG Daniel Kaffee (Tom Cruise) by the Judge Advocate General office of the Navy, as their chief defense attorney. Later on, Cmdr. Jo Galloway (Demi Moore) gets on the defense team at the behest of one defendant's aunt. (Lt. Sam Weinberg, played by Kevin Pollak, is assigned second-chair, or assistant defense attorney, duties.)

In due course, it is discovered that PFC Santiago has been scheduled for a Code Red. This is an informal disciplinary action given by people generally just above the recipient of discipline in the chain of command. No records are kept of it whenever it is administered, but that's because it's officially not supposed to exist as a method of keeping people in line. It turns out that the Code Red was administered to Santiago because he was having trouble keeping up with his unit. He inconveniently dies as a direct result of the Code Red, and it is the duty of Lt. JG Kaffee and his defense team to get the two flunky underlings off the hook.

Lt. JG Kaffee has a reputation for plea-bargaining cases (largely because he is overly fond of networking on the baseball diamond). His supervisors in the JAG office in Washington assign him this case in the explicit hope that he learn proper investigative techniques and actually take a case to trial for a change. It turns out that he has a genuine gift, inherited from his father (who served as US Attorney General at one time), for courtroom argumentation. It gets to the point where, at the court-martial ending the movie, the CO in charge of said court-martial kept having to sustain prosecution objections to Kaffee's line of questioning.

Unfortunately, the most famous line, "You can't handle the truth!", is delivered almost at the end of the movie, so I can't go into detail about the circumstances surrounding the line. However, I can safely say that Col. Nathan Jessup - played eerily by Jack Nicholson - is shown to be a total power-hungry so-and-so out for nothing more than the esteem of his colleagues.

He also has a devotion to duty unparalleled in the civilian world. In the Marines - actually a division of the Navy, which is why the Navy's JAG office is involved here - duty and honor are important. A FEW GOOD MEN makes it clear that your unit and the Corps actually come before God in the Marines; duty is considered that important, at least to some overly-zealous Marines. Even though there was the possibility that PFC Santiago might have had an illness contributing to his Code Red death, he was still considered derelict in his duty by extremely strict commanding officers who would rather not have had him in the US Marine Corps in the first place. Put another way, they took the advertising tag line "the few, the proud, the Marines" a bit too seriously.

Several supporting performances also bring out this USMC corporate devotion to duty. When you rent this movie, watch especially the performances of the PFC and the Lance Corporal who unintentionally murdered PFC Santiago. James Marshall (playing PFC Loudon Downey) and Wolfgang Bodison (playing Lance Cpl. Harold W. Dawson) succeeded in convincing this reviewer that they were a fairly standard feature in any unit: people who are willing to go to any length to obey orders, even if they are specifically directed to disobey those orders by military codes of conduct.

Aaron Sorkin, who adapted his stage play for the screen, also included ample room for character development. It is especially gratifying to see the way in which Tom Cruise took this hint, and took Lt. JG Kaffee from being a lazy plea-bargainer to someone willing to fight to the death to see justice done. In TAPS - one of his early film roles - Cruise convincingly played someone on the other side of the fence, and he brings his TAPS experience to bear in playing the role of Lt. JG Kaffee. Cruise actually seems to me to understand the mentality driving Nicholson and Kiefer Sutherland (playing someone two levels down the chain of command from Col. Jessup) to be so fanatically loyal to their duties.

In short, A FEW GOOD MEN proves the same point as the Nuremberg trials - authority must be balanced by ethics if it is to work to any great extent. Orders cannot be followed blindly, or else people will die in the process of seeing those orders fulfilled; devotion to duty cannot outrank simple human kindness. The mere fact that some people cannot hack being Marines does not warrant treating them like dirt or even blindly following a Code Red order to haze them or even kill them. A FEW GOOD MEN represents fine high drama in the best sense of the term, and its point is capable of being understood by those in high school. Some of the finer details, though, might go over the heads of adolescents younger than about 12; they are just too abstract for younger adolescents and children.

November 10 is the birthday of the US Marine Corps. In honour of this occasion, which is a big event for Marines, the following recruits have signed up to celebrate the event in style by posting a review that is related in some way to the Marine Corps, the military, military history, or perhaps even something that would be meaningful. Please stop by these reviewers' sites and partake of their contributions:

AliventiAsylum, andymcf, badkittyM, conradd, DrDevience, ed_grover, jo.com, kidnykid, klueger, kurt_messick (the co-host and organizer of our fine writeoff), lilscamp, lorendiac, luyagushka, mrkstvns, mshawpyle, sleeper54, tombarnes,usmarinecorps (our other co-host, and the first honoree of this writeoff), wadesam, xiphoid, 4-1-1

In particular, this write-off was inspired by the recent appearance on Epinions.com of new member usmarinecorps, who joined Epinions.com in September and is celebrating his two-month anniversary on November 10, and is currently serving in the Persian Gulf area. It also celebrates the contributions of Shane, the son of Epinions.com member conradd, who is currently in training in San Diego and graduates from boot camp in December.

Semper fidelis!


Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: Good for Groups
Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 13 and Older