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Jarhead 3: The Siege (2016) – Review

So once again it seems I’ve got to do the whole explaining thing about the unfathomable existence of the Jarhead franchise. To deliver the short version, the original Jarhead was a vehemently anti-war film that told the story of a bunch of soldiers trained up to kill and sent to Kuwait and Iraq to participate in Orperation Desert Storm – but the twist is that when they get there, there’s nothing for them to do and their hopes of serving their country soon turns sour as the boredom starts to pick them apart. That’s right; the entire point of Sam Mendes’ movie is that the killer instinct driven into these young men soon becomes harmful when it’s discovered that there’s no action for them to react to.
Fast forward a bit to 2014 and we’re now on the second sequel to Jarhead and both have shown a spectacular lack of understanding as to what their source material was trying to say. But with Jarhead 3: The Siege once again trying to swap out anti-war sentiment to pro-military flag waving, should I just try and put Mendes’ vision aside and enjoy the big bangs?

Evan Albright has been stationed at the American embassy of a seemingly quiet city in the Middle East and soon discovers that despite his eagerness to serve his country, there’s more chance that he’ll be brushing up on his video game skills than hand to hand combat or his marksmanship. In fact, after being shown around, meeting his fellow troops and doing such mundane tasks as helping the ambassador read to children for charity work, Albright feels like he’s made a terrible mistake.
Noticing his uncomfortable nature is hardass Gunnery Sergeant Pete Raines, who tries to school the new recruit concerning his expectations and a noticable lian wolf attitude to proceedings, however Albright simply just can’t let his guard down and after he believes he spots suspicious faces in the crowds outside the embassy, he goes over the heads of his superiors to report it.
This only succeeds in pissing everyone around him off and his punishment is demeaning as it is alarming as Raines stages a fake kidnapping to take some of the piss and vinegar out of the new guy. Of course, if anyone here has seen a direct to video, modern war movie before we all already know that Albright is actually bang on the money and the embassy really is on the verge of being attacked by a radical militant who had been thought to have been killed weeks earlier. Before you can say “13 Hours”, the embassy is under siege with bullets flying everywhere and everyone inside has to dig down to do their jobs, because not only do the marines have to protect the staff, the staff can’t leave until all sensitive documents and equipment has been burned, shredded or trashed. With waves of militants swaming the grounds, can Albright become a team player while the movie delivers a pointed boot to the genitals of the message of the original movie?

If I could break character a little to make something of a personal point; over that past year or so I’ve review a lot of direct to video sequels of military based franchises, so I freely admit that I’m getting burnt out thanks to a semi-regular diet of cheapjack sequels to Jarhead, Sniper, Behind Enemy Lines and The Marine as they’re all starting to blur into one another. But while Jarhead has thus far avoided casting any WWE wrestlers, it certainly doesn’t help that Dennis Haysbert shows up in this third installment who not only pops up frequently in the Sniper series, but also showed up in the first Jarhead. To make matters even more confusing, Haybert is apparently playing the same character (Major Lincoln) as he did in Sam Mendes’ film, which doesn’t make any thematic sense at all? Why am I spending so much time bringing up other franchises and the opportunistic filmography of the man who played President David Palmer in 24? Simple, because pondering these sorts of things  prove to be far more entertaining that the actual plot of the movie which once again stands as some sort of weird recruiting video, rather than a film that has anything profound to say about warfare in general.
What’s so ironic is that if Jarhead 3 wasn’t trying to hard to affiliate itself with a franchise that shouldn’t really exist, there’s a chance that it might be a little better regarded as, like most of its cinema dodging peers, it’s a fairly slick affair that’s loaded with action. However, it also had the misfortune to share a plot and release year of Michael Bay’s far more spectacular 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers Of Benghazi, which proves to be a far more engrossing,  expansive and (weirdly for Bay) ground look at such an event that tends to show The Siege off as something of a cheap looking pretender.

Elsewhere, we also find that the movie has cast feet flinging stealth action legend Scott Adkins, but made the monumental mistake of not having him be the focal point of the film. Instead, his constantly seething Gunnery Sergeant is more of a hard-nosed mentor as Charlie Webster’s vanilla hero takes centre stage to deliver a rudimentary character arc. Yep, from the complex stokes of Sam Mendes’ original, we’re again offered up yet another story that basically lays out a marine learning the hard way how to be a better soldier when the bullets start flying. Similarly, the movie seems barely interested in dealing with the usual politics that arise in these sort of things or altering any typical ethnic stereotypes, but that isn’t particularly surprising considering the unsubtle cash grab nature of the franchise.
To give the devil it’s due, those more familiar with playing COD than keeping up with actual events will probably find it a passable popcorn actioner and Director William Kaufman – he of last year’s Osiris and (surprise, surprise) The Marine 4 – does exactly what he’s hired to do: stage a large scale siege/firefight while keeping it within the established budgetary restrictions. However, while the movie keeps its basic gears greased and moving, you’ll struggle to care if any of the rather flat ensemble are in danger of catching a fateful bullet or decide to sacrifice themselves for the greater good. As a result, the Jarhead name whips up yet another shallow, empty adventure with nothing much to say other than “kill the bad guys”.

While technically passable, thanks to enough RPGs and explosions to carry it through with a less demanding audience, Jarhead 3 still suffers from trying to ride the coat tails of an infinitely smarter and better movie. Maybe if it had been released under its own steam under a different title, it might have been easier to take seriously, but as it stands, it’s still like trying to follow up Star Wars with Roger Corman’s Space Raiders.
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Jarhead 2: Field Of Fire (2014) – Review

It’s a strange fact that some movies would benefit hugely if they didn’t find themselves tangled up in the strings that comes with having a number at the end of a title. Take the truly baffling decision to try and turn Sam Mendes 2004, anti-war flick, Jarhead, into a full-blown, action/war franchise despite the fact that the original movie was noticable primarily for the lack of action that was vitally necessary to the story. As a response, we get a film directed by the man who gave us American Beauty, Skyfall and 1917 that suddenly got a follow up crafted by the man who made 2 Sniper sequels, 3 Tremors sequels and Half Past Dead.
But if we try and strip away the fact that the sequels (yes, sequels plural) spectacularly missed the point, is Don Michael Paul’s Jarhead 2 actually that bad? I mean, it’s certainly a direct to DVD title that riddles subtlety full of holes throughout its many action sequences and firefighter, but is it actually unwatchable?

As the war in Afghanistan continues, we focus on a resupply team who’s main task is to drive supplies to various outposts and attempt to unload while usually under fire. However, when their Staff Sergeant catches an RPG and expires due to massive blood loss and a missing leg, the fearsome Major Gavins selects a war weary Chris Merrimette to step up and take his place. But while having a one of their number bumped up the ladder of command gives Merrimette’s fellow Marines cause to joke, the newly promoted Sergeant is certain his latest tour will be his final one as he has a wife an daughter waiting for him back home.
But despite what the first Jarhead had to say about the long, tedious, downtime that comes with this war, Merrimette doesn’t have time to muse on this too much as he and his team have yet another delivery to make. However, on route to their destination toward a remote outpost through Taliban-controlled territory, the group run into a clutch of Navy SEALS who desperately need their help in a misson of utmost importance. It seems that under their protection is Anoosh, an Afghanistan woman who has become famous for her defiance of the Taliban and Fox, the SEAL running the show, acquires Merrimette’s team to aid him keep her safe.
Cue a ton of enemy fire as the Taliban attempt to move heaven and earth to try and kill or capture Anoosh and as the gang of American soldiers slowly start to get whittled down, Merrimette and his tram start questioning their presence in Afghanistan and whether this – or any – mission during this war is worth their lives.
However, mulling over a wartime existential crisis isn’t going to stop those bullets from flying, so Merrimette and his rapidly battle-scarred team have to make peace with some plain truths pretty fast or no one is going to make it home.

I think it’s pretty obvious that at some point I’m going to lambast Jarhead 2 for being tone deaf on a scale that truly beggars belief, so to change things up a little, I’m going to start with the good stuff before I start caterwauling about Hollywood’s gargantuan lack of common sense and I have to admit, while the works of Don Michael Paul and I have had various run-ins before, it seems that Field Of Fire caught me in something of an amicable mood. Yes, much like a lot of Paul’s other, military themed feature films, it’s lacking in real nuance, and laden with repetitive action sequences, but it’s actually made to a surprisingly high standard for an unasked for sequel that directly flies in the face of its predecessor. The copious action, while obviously is one of the film’s most galling blunders, may be overused and ends up being predictable and repetitive, but taken on a purely technically level, actually does the job pretty damn well. Yes, expecting us to cheer when a bad guy gets liquidated by point blank grenade fire probably wasn’t what Mendes was planning when he adapted the memoir of Anthony Swofford, but if you can imagine that Jarhead 2 could actually drop the Jarhead 2 title and simply forge ahead with the “Field Of Fire” subtitle, then it isn’t half bad when trying to achieve it’s simplistic targets.
Another plus point is the cast that features a surprisingly array of familiar faces. Josh Kelly’s rather bland Chris Merrimette and his grumbles about the war in Afghanistan may provide an entry level, wartime lead, but more than making up for it us the presence of a post-Avatar/pre-Don’t Breathe Stephen Lang doing a cheaper rendition of his Miles Quaritch shtick, a typically intense Cole (Pitch Black) Hauser as Fox and the always good value for money Bokeem Woodbine, even if he’s saddled with a tired trope that sees him mistrust Khalid, the native assigned to the team. Still, even though the rest of the cast are separated by the merest of character traits, they handle the action well – but as anyone who saw the original film knows, copious amounts of machine gun fire is kind of a major part of the problem.

While Jarhead 2: Field Of Fire may not miss the point of an original film as erroneously as, say, American Psycho 2 (surely the Mount Everest of all misguided sequels), you do have to shake your head in disbelief that someone watched the original Jarhead and figured that making a follow-up that does the exact opposite was the way to go. In fact, there’s a distinct feel that none of the powers that be have actually seen the film that they were riding the coat tails of such is the huge gulf between them. Not only are they set during completely different conflicts, but the entire raison d’être of Mendes’ original was what the lack of action can do to a soldier’s psyche when they’ve been trained by their government to become a killing machine and then given absolutely no outlet for it. In a bone headed response, not only are we greeted with an engagement with the enemy literally from the word go, but Field Of Fire then goes on to also omit every shred of cruel irony that typified what came before. In its stead we have loads of heavy handed patriotism and plenty of Sturm und Drang as the formally disillusioned Merrimette eventually comes round to putting the mission first. Now, while that’s a perfectly acceptable character arc for a war film (pretty standard, actually), you soon realise that it’s a pretty stupid choice for a film that follows Jake Gyllenhaal virtually spiraling into having a nervous breakdown due to the military machine winding him up and then repeatedly refusing to pull his trigger.

A perfectly respectable – if overly simplistic – modern war movie is instantly rendered cartoonishly silly simply because someone didn’t understand the point of a previous film. However, Jarhead 2 unfairly finds itself at the mercy of how you’re willing to watch it and only manages to justify its strange existence if you’re willing to ignore the fact that the rather unique original was crafted by Oscar worthy talents. Whack another star on if you can mentally remove “Jarhead” from the title, but if you respected Mendes and Gyllenhaal’s work, that’s going to be pretty tough to do.
I mean, did the director of Half Past Dead really think he could do a better job than Sam Mendes?
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Jarhead (2005) – Review

War is Hell. After a succession of movies that sprang out of the savagery of Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan and Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, there’s no question, it’s something we should all know by now – however, in 2005, American Beauty director Sam Mendes gave us an alternate view. Yes, war is hell, but so is boredom and with Jarhead, the director proved that both can be a fairly damaging combination.
When war erupted in the Gulf after Iraq invaded Kuwait in the August of 1990, we saw a new form of warfare that started to rely more and more on airstrikes and drones and less on actual boots on the ground. However, that meant that we had waves of soldiers getting trained and riled up about going into battle only for some of them to see virtually no action whatsoever. While constant war can have a devastating effect on the human psyche, what effect can inaction have on young men trained to kill?

In 1989, Anthony Swofford attends United States Marine Corps recruit training and instantly regrets it as he struggles with the constant abuse and alpha male behavior of his peers. However, resorting to chugging laxatives to feign illness and avoid his responsibilities, he’s approached by Staff Sergeant Sykes who claims he sees potential in this man who jokes he enlisted because his “got lost on the way to college” and offers him a place on his Scout Sniper course. After some gruelling training, Swofford manages to be one of the eight passing Marines along with his roommate Corporal Alan Troy, who becomes his spotter and it seems that Anthony has finally made peace with his decision to join the military.
Of course, it’s at that point that the Gulf War erupts and before you know it, Swofford and his unit find themselves deployed to Saudi Arabia as part of Operation Desert Shield and while the soldiers are utterly pumped that they’re heading abroad to save the world and “get some”, reality proves to be a whole lot more uneventful. Unsurprisingly, when you wind up a group of young men and teach them to be killers, they prove to be confused and frustrated that they spending virtually no time in the field of battle. Frustration soon turns to boredom and boredom eventually turns to anger and paranoia as the urge to kill simply won’t abate.
Add to this the monotony of endless drills, the fact that Swofford become convinced that his girlfriend back home is cheating on him and soon the cracks begin to show, but while the pressure mounts, different colleagues handle it in different ways – some healthier than others. But soon the call comes out to for them to head out to be part of Operation Dessert Storm and the promise of longed-for combat finally seems at hand; but in war, nothing is guaranteed.

There are quite a few ways to to look a Jarhead. One is that it’s something of an inverse of Full Metal Jacket that sees a similar start as Jake Gyllenhaal’s directionless grunt suffer the similar sort of indignities reserved for the likes of privates Joker and Pyle as the attempt to weather the dehumanising training period only to eventually encounter far more vivid horrors in the front row in the theatre of war. However, while Matthew Modine’s character finds that he has to “earn” his right to kill on the battlefield, the players in Mendes show are desperate for it, only to be denied it to the point of distraction. It’s a strange thing to see people root and yearn for in a movie but it expertly show just how much of an odd conflict the Gulf War really was – after all, to a rational person in the real world, killing someone is that last thing you’d want to do, but Mendes mischievously gives us the most ironic of premises. What happens to the human mind when you train it to do a horrible thing without question, and then deny it the exact thing you’ve programmed it to do? It’s a fascinating conundrum and Jarhead is fairly unique by being a war film with practically no war to speak of.
In some ways, it helped spiritually pave the way for Kathryn Bigalow’s The Hurt Locker which also examines the human mind being unable to switch off the need for war that arises from being trained to embrace it – but while Jeremy’s Renner’s experiences were both figuratively and literally explosive, Gyllenhaal and the gang writhe in inaction. So what do a bunch of red blooded killing machines do when left to distraction? Well, they sure masturbate a lot, that’s for damn certain, but while Gyllenhaal slowly and expertly goes into a slow meltdown, his peers handle things in other ways. Peter Sarsgaard’s Troy loves the life, but also fashions a desperate need to put his tools to practical use when he finds his military career in jeopardy; Lucas Black’s Kruger rankles at the obvious attempted cash grab of oil and Jamie Fox’s Staff Sergeant lifer just seems to handle things as they go – but all do sterling work putting across how bizarrely stressful their unstressful tour is going.

After numerous scenes of multiple trained killers desperately trying to keep their spirits up, it the scenes at the near the end of the film that really slam home truly how strange modern warfare has become when Swofford and Troy finally get a mission to assassinate a high ranking member of the Iraqi Republican Guard. After lining up the man in their sights for a peach of a shot, they find the very moment that could give them purpose taken away from them when, at the last second, their superiors change their mind and use an air strike instead. By this point we find ourselves almost hoping these young men get their wish and finally get to be of “use” and while killing a single man who is about to be vaporised by a missile is gmgardly going to change anything, the fact that Mendes has us caught in such a moral muddle proves how mired in greys everything is.
However, while Mendes unsurprisingly embraces his themes wholeheartedly (his deconstructing of hyper-masculinity from American Beauty is still very much present and correct), cinematographer Roger Deakins has his back visually as he teases out the terrible beauty of the bleached landscape and the desolation of the desert. Even more stunning are the scenes where the unit have to operate in the shadow of vast plumes of flame erupting from the ground due to the oil fields being set alight and it’s a perfectly beautiful and terrible sight.

While I’d personally suggest that Jarhead probably isn’t your best go to film if you want a more contemporary war film (is it technically a war film if there’s actually no war in it), it’s these exact points that make it so important in the face of countless, low budget, DTV action movies that portray their leads as flawless, death dealing super men – something that ironically befell Jarhead itself at it somehow bizarrely managed to obtain several, tone deaf, gung-ho sequels. Anyway, if you like your (anti) war films thought provoking, loaded with great performances, visually striking and piled with questions with no easy answers, Jarhead is full to the brim.
They call war “the suck” – but the film certainly doesn’t.
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Jared

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