A Few Good Men (1992)

A Few Good Men (1992)

 

9/10

 Starring

Tom Cruise

Jack Nicholson

Demi Moore

Kevin Bacon

Kevin Pollak

 

Directed by Rob Reiner

 

Memory fails a lot when you recall movies, I remember this movie a lot differently when I saw it sometime in the late 90s. Seeing it now and I must confess the movie is just amazing crazier and airtight than I remembered. The movie plays on the pride of soldiers and Tom Cruise character Kaffee was able to win his case against a high-ranking colonel by playing on the man’s pride.

Based on Aaron Sorkin’s play of the same name in 1989, this movie was both a critical and commercial success and rated as one of the best courtroom dramas you could see.

The power in the movie is the way Cruise, Demi Moore and Jack Nicholson portrayed their characters. Each one sold us in disliking them, from the very start and it takes half way into the movie before the lines are drawn and you begin to cheer the good guys. The movie has one powerful scene when Kaffee had to take on Colonel Jessup (Nicholson) while putting his career on the line and could face jail time. It was in this scene after a long berating of one another that the popular line, “you can’t handle the truth” was said by Jessup.

The movie kicks off with the death of a marine named Santiago. He died after his colleagues Lance Corporal Dawson and Private Downey gagged and tied him up. At first, we are put in the side of the dead marine, this man is dead and these two are guilty. What I love about the script is how much it dug its claws into placing us in this realm and making us wonder why Galloway (Moore) and Kaffee were ok in defending these men.

Then we go to where they are posted in Guantanamo and we discover that the men were in this problem because they were placed there via a chain of command. Dawson and Downey stand on their innocence claiming that the gagging and everything was ordered to be done on Santiago and other actions were done on him to toughen him up. The movie than changes narrative as we see that the bad buys in this movie are not Dawson or Downey, but the people that they report to and how much these guys have covered their ass so much that there was no way they can be touched.

Kaffee was faced with the task of finding away to get these guys off being prosecuted for murder.

Although the movie did not win any Oscar or Golden Globe it did have four and five nominations respectively including in the Best Picture category in both award ceremony.

This is a fantastic film to see any day.