Gunnery Sgt. Tom Highway, with a whisky-husky, phlegm-clogged voice, several patches of scar tissue on face and neck, and a haircut tapered like a bullet, is a decent addition to Clint Eastwood's repertory of roles: a Marine Corps lifer on the brink of mandatory retirement, with seven or eight tiers of ribbons dating back to Korea on his breast, but with a recent history of drunkenness and disobedience ("It's true, I have had differences with some limp dicks"), a divorcé with a willingness to peruse women's magazines in order to bone up on his "sensitivity," but still an insatiable brawler and an invincible one, too -- in short, that combination of egocentric rebel and self-righteous authoritarian that seems so uniquely Eastwoodian, and perhaps also so universally American. But "character" goes wasted when the script is designed simply to assist him in scoring personal points (while completely shutting out the rest of the cast). The dialogue is saltier than usual for this sort of thing (the cap must have fallen off the shaker into the soup), though this is scarcely enough to revive the savoriness of, or disguise the rancidness of, the hoary old storyline about whipping into shape a platoon of goof-offs -- over obstacle courses, at the firing range, on 5 a.m. jogs, etc. And the climactic invasion of Grenada (no joke) hardly seems worth putting in the win column to restore the balance after the defeat in Vietnam and the draw in Korea. The filmmakers attempt to put it there nonetheless. With Marsha Mason and Mario Van Peebles; directed by Eastwood. (1986) — Duncan Shepherd
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