Jarhead
Universal Pictures | Release Date: November 4, 2005 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
58
METASCORE
Mixed or average reviews based on 40 Critic Reviews
Positive:
20
Mixed:
18
Negative:
2
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
67
Austin ChronicleMarc Savlov
This is a war film with precious little war, which was also the crux of Swofford's book. Read full review
58
Baltimore SunMichael Sragow
Caught up in its own macho symbolism, Jarhead fights a losing battle to show the human cost of warfare. Read full review
63
Boston GlobeTy Burr
All writers are entitled to tell the story of their own war, whether it's on the battlefield, in their head, or -- as is usually the case -- somewhere in between. Like it or not, Anthony Swofford did just that. Mendes, by contrast, tells the story of a Hollywood war, and it's simply not the news we can use. Read full review
88
Charlotte ObserverLawrence Toppman
It's a unique vision of war from the point of view of a Marine who never pulled a trigger against a foe. Read full review
30
Chicago ReaderJonathan Rosenbaum
Jarhead virtually begins with a rip-off of the basic-training sequence that opens Stanley Kubrick's "Full Metal Jacket." Read full review
88
Chicago Sun-TimesRoger Ebert
It is not often that a movie catches exactly what it was like to be this person in this place at this time, but Jarhead does. Read full review
63
Chicago TribuneAllison Benedikt
Inner dialogue is a hard sell on screen. Read full review
67
Christian Science MonitorPeter Rainer
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. Read full review
70
Dallas ObserverRobert Wilonsky
It may feel familiar, but it's a bleak and profound piece of work. Read full review
60
EmpireColin Kennedy
While not quite the war movie that many of us were hoping to see right now, Mendes’ dispassionate take on the first Gulf War has many merits, and it does bring vividly to life the peculiar dilemma of the modern soldier. Read full review
83
Entertainment WeeklyOwen Gleiberman
Jarhead isn't overtly political, yet by evoking the almost surreal futility of men whose lust for victory through action is dashed, at every turn, by the tactics, terrain, and morality of the war they're in, it sets up a powerfully resonant echo of the one we're in today. Read full review
70
Film ThreatPete Vonder Haar
Jarhead does feature stunning visuals. Mendes and cinematographer Roger Deakins have created some fantastic imagery. Read full review
50
L.A. WeeklyScott Foundas
Curiously, Jarhead transforms Swofford himself (played by Jake Gyllenhaal) from the book’s duty-bound youth, desperate to live up to his father's military legacy, into an enigmatic voyeur whose feelings and motivations are rarely made clear. Read full review
50
Los Angeles TimesKenneth Turan
As much as we intellectually admire Jarhead, it's a cold film that only sporadically makes the kind of emotional connection it's after. Read full review
50
Miami HeraldRene Rodriguez
After an hour of being stranded among these restless soldiers and their increasingly aggressive locker-room antics, you, too, will be longing for combat -- for anything -- to happen. Read full review
50
New York Daily NewsJami Bernard
The movie has some of the washed-out look of David O. Russell's excellent "Three Kings," but none of the edge. That's part of the point - that nothing leads to anything, at least not in this particular war. Read full review
60
New York Magazine (Vulture)Ken Tucker
As a result, Jarhead is utterly predictable (boys endure tough training; boys encounter another culture and are baffled), studded with first-rate performances. Read full review
38
New York PostKyle Smith
Marines did not play football in full anti-chemical suits in 112-degree weather; men would have been collapsing and perhaps dying because it was so hard to breathe in the gas masks. Do I quibble over details? Details are all the movie offers. There isn't a story. Read full review
60
NewsweekDavid Ansen
It's an expertly made film that, scene by scene, holds your attention. But both emotionally and intellectually, it doesn't add up. Read full review
75
Philadelphia InquirerSteven Rea
They're all dressed up to kill, with no place to go. Read full review
75
Portland OregonianShawn Levy
The result is typical Mendes: accomplished, calculated and uncommitted. Maybe it's because his talent comes to him too easily, but I've yet to sense his heart and soul in a film. Read full review
50
PremiereGlenn Kenny
That Jarhead is an impressive technical achievement is a given, but ultimately this picture is the last thing any war movie should be: innocuous. Read full review
88
ReelViewsJames Berardinelli
Jarhead is about how the experience of being in the military fundamentally changes an individual. In this case, the focus isn't about the madness of slaughter in the jungle, but the madness of inaction in the desert. Read full review
75
Rolling StonePeter Travers
Even when the script slips into sermonizing -- a Swoff voice-over informs us that we're all still "in the desert" -- Mendes keeps invading us with emotions. The jolt of Jarhead is undeniable, and it comes when you least expect it. Read full review
50
SalonStephanie Zacharek
Mendes doesn't care about people -- he's too busy making his art. And with Jarhead he pulls off, effortlessly, what so many pro-and antiwar individuals since Vietnam have tried so conscientiously to avoid: His movie is antiwar and anti-soldier. Read full review
75
San Francisco ChronicleMick LaSalle
A harsh and thoroughly unromantic examination of the scarring effects of war. Read full review
91
Seattle Post-IntelligencerWilliam Arnold
The sum of the movie is devastating. One takes out of it a sense that the human cost of our endless adventure in Iraq is going to be incalculable, perhaps catastrophic -- a psychological time bomb that will be exploding for decades to come. Read full review
50
SlateDavid Edelstein
"Three Kings" is fictional, obviously, and Mendes and Broyles were bound by the facts of Swofford's life. But the violence in "Three Kings" was visceral, whereas Jarhead's never penetrates the blood-brain barrier. It's locked away in its narrator's jarhead. Read full review
70
The A.V. ClubScott Tobias
Screenwriter William Broyles, Jr., a former Vietnam pilot and "Newsweek" editor, connects reasonably well with the material, but "American Beauty" director Sam Mendes has a tendency to smooth out the rough edges, and the film goes flat as month-old soda. Read full review
63
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Rick Groen
The result is a war picture that, trying to pass off fidelity to the book as objectivity, sacrifices any voice of its own, and ends up not knowing what to think. Read full review
60
The Hollywood ReporterKirk Honeycutt
Jarhead refuses to engage in its own point of view toward events it depicts. So the film feels empty and tentative, uncertain of what if anything these events add up to. Read full review
80
The New RepublicStanley Kauffmann
The daring achievement of Jarhead is that it is not a film about war, about combat: it is about being a soldier. Read full review
50
The New York TimesDana Stevens
Mr. Swofford's book has earned a place alongside the classics of military literature, but Mr. Mendes's film is more like a footnote - a minor movie about a minor war, and a film that feels, at the moment, remarkably irrelevant. Read full review
50
The New YorkerDavid Denby
Has an oddly amorphous and inconclusive feeling to it. We never do find out who Tony (Jake Gyllenhaal) is, and his best friend, Troy (Peter Sarsgaard), who shifts back and forth between sanity and hysteria, is a mystery, too. Read full review
63
TV Guide MagazineKen Fox
Viewers hoping for a brutal, pitch-black war comedy along the lines of M*A*S*H are in for a major disappointment. Read full review
75
USA TodayMike Clark
What we're left with is solid if not exceptional, though it's good to see Mendes expanding as a filmmaker. Read full review
60
VarietyTodd McCarthy
Part absurdist drama, part personal observational commentary and part hormonal explosion, all seen through the filter of previous war pics, Sam Mendes' third feature has numerous arresting moments but never achieves a confident, consistent or sufficiently audacious tone. Read full review
50
Village VoiceJ. Hoberman
One of the few Hollywood movies to ever acknowledge the Desert Storm "experience," Sam Mendes's Jarhead is both fastidiously grueling and perversely withholding. Read full review
50
Wall Street JournalJoe Morgenstern
An exercise in inertia about an exercise in futility.
60
Washington PostStephen Hunter
What's so good about the movie is Gyllenhaal's refusal to show off; he doesn't seem jealous of the camera's attention when it goes to others and is content, for long stretches, to serve simply as a prism though which other young men can be observed. Read full review
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