“Jarhead” (2005) / “The Ringer” (2005)
“Disappointment” is the only word I can muster to describe these two movies. Jarhead was supposed to be the definitive war movie of a generation, and The Ringer had the look of a classic slapstick comedy movie along the lines of a Farelly Brothers movie. Close, but no cigar in both cases.
[rate 3]
Lets start with Jarhead. There is a lot to like about the movie. It is well made and authentic in detail. From people’s comments who served in Desert Storm, it portrays the rigors of gearing up for a war that was over in half a week. The acting is good, the dialog and interaction between the characters believable.
But there are some things that don’t make sense. Like a pair of A-10′s firing on friendly troops less than a quarter mile from the Marines’ jump-off positions. A few miles in, sure. But not so close to the encampment. Then the main characters are trained as scout-snipers, yet spend the ramp-up time just killing time with the rest of the company. They weren’t sent out on scouting and intelligence operations like they were trained for. Maybe this is what really went on, but it made no sense.
The biggest problem I had with the movie, though, was it was so derivative of Viet Nam era movies. You could see direct influences of Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket sprinkled around. Which wouldn’t be so bad except this was supposed to be the movie “for a generation” – so why is it using the same imagery and motifs as Viet Nam? It didn’t really break new ground, it didn’t tell the story of a new breed of soldiers.
All in all it wasn’t “bad,” but it could have been so much more. Some of the documentaries done recently on the Discovery Channel do a better job of portraying combat life in Iraq than Jarhead did. And for a lot less money.
[rate 2.5]
The ads for The Ringer looked promising. Johnny Knoxville is actually pretty good at physical comedy and the premise looked like it would work. Well, it worked on an episode of South Park where Cartman tried to enter the Special Olympics in order to win the prize money for himself.
When the movie let Knoxville do what he’s good at, The Ringer was fun. The writing is decent and the acting by all concerned, including the challenged, is quite good.
There are two problems, though. One is the movie took itself too serious. It had to have Drama. A comedy about someone pretending to be retarded does not need drama. It needs lots of laughs. And that was the second problem, there just weren’t enough funny scenes. There were so many opportunities where they could have really gone for the gut with sight gags and physical comedy – without being insulting to anyone – and they just didn’t seem to want to push the envelope. Knoxville was given more freedom to be funny in Big Trouble, where he played a character who was in fact slow-witted.
If The Ringer had taken more than just the idea from the writers of South Park, if it had also borrowed their no-holds-barred style, The Ringer could have been awesome. As it turned out, it was more of a comedy-drama – and not very good at either.
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