By Evan Ferstenfeld

The spittle-spewing, soldier ingesting drill sergeant from Full Metal Jacket. The helicopters of death ripping into a quiet Vietnamese countryside like a pack of military Hell's Angels, blaring classical gas while releasing mustard gas in Apocalypse Now. The shaky camerawork that feels like you are constantly surfing the crest of a mortal shell blast in Saving Private Ryan. Taken together, these images represent some of the ultimate cinematic icons of American warfare. Any new recruit rising up from the Hollywood platoons to record their vision of the last few American conflicts has taken great strides to maintain their distance from the classics, instead pointing their laser scopes towards the smaller details that made the experiences in wartime unique.

The marines populating the ranks of Jarhead, director Sam Mendes's latest stab at the American experience (American Beauty and Road to Perdition were both directed by this prolific Brit), have been ogling these iconic visuals since infancy, as has the movie-going public intent on seeing a new comment on the first Persian Gulf war with fresh, more learned eyes. Almost obsessively at first, Jarhead seems hell-bent on not only paying obvious homage to those cornerstones of cinematic combat carnage, but sometimes strikingly cuts to the direct feed of these original sources.

Mendes treating his film like a greatest hits package of the past's war zones and movie reels is no mere coincidence. Told from the true recollections of a marine grunt on the eve of the Kuwaiti invasion, Anthony Swofford (Jake Gyllenhaal, joining Tobey Maguire on the short list of indie film nerd alerts-turned-buff unlikely action moguls) and his group of expertly trained life-takers (including Jamie Foxx trying his damndest to convince us he kills people for a living) are shown engaging in the highly monotonous journey from shooting holes through cardboard silhouettes at training camp, to shooting at nothing on the scorched white expanses of Kuwait. From the pressure of waiting in an alien environment, to the boredom and hypocrisy that ensues when soldiers are wound up and held on their tightest setting is labored over in excruciating detail. Jarhead is at its frisky, smart-aleck best during the first half of this adventure, consisting of a tone somewhere between the goofy inanity of Pauly Shore's In the Army Now and the poetic insanity of Coppola's Apocalypse Now.

As the war finally turns its crank from Desert Shield to Storm, the promised action that both the audience and Jarhead's characters have been strangely salivating for seems to be only a SCUD's throw away. Striking hard from unexpected territory, director Mendes finally launches his gleefully frustrating full-scale sneak attack, all to fling those iconic gung-ho constructs from all of our collective minds. For better or for worse, he aggravatingly succeeds in his mission.

Filming a war story fought almost exclusively by modern, long-range machinery from the perspective of an old-school, single target sniper is quite a challenging and noble endeavor, making Jarhead one of the few dramas detailing what didn't happen at wartime rather than what did. However, Mendes and screenwriter William Boyles Jr. offer little reward for watching this inaction in action: Jarhead's artier aspirations are left simmering half-baked on the desert floor, while no conclusions or dramatic payoffs - no matter how ambiguous - are even attempted so that the audience might have something to hang their helmets of frustration on.

Jarhead does offer starkly beautiful visual luster and scattered fresh Intel on the psyche of a soldier who unknowingly participated in America's first large-scale scuffle for mainly economic reasons. However, Jarhead's primary statement is summed up within the first two minutes of David O. Russell's superior Gulf War heist thriller Three Kings. After capping in the back a completely oblivious Iraqi who may or may not have been part of the resistance, the ecstatic American gunner hoots out, "Hot damn!! I didn't think I was gonna get to shoot ANYTHING for this entire stinkin' war!"

Grade: C+
Rating: R
Running Time: 115 Mins.