Directed by Sam Mendes

Universal Pictures

3 1/2 STARS



“Jarhead” is director Sam Mendes’ third movie, and like his first two (“American Beauty,” “Road to Perdition”), it dances around the subject of violence. As it follows the action of the first Gulf War, we sense chaos indirectly. We see bomb blasts reflected through windows; we watch smoke rise above the bodies of Iraqi civilians, recently burnt off-screen.

This violence is filtered through the eyes of narrator Anthony Swofford (Jake Gyllenhaal), the everyman U.S. Marine, or “jarhead,” whose war autobiography this movie adapts.

While training, Swofford is selected to join an elite scout unit, and he trades in his girlfriend for a sniper rifle and Peter Sarsgaard, his increasingly unstable spotter. Sergeant Siek (Jamie Foxx) leads Swofford’s unit, and it’s not that he’s a bad guy­—he just enjoys torturing his trainees.

Siek’s tough love continues when the marines ship out to fight Saddam. The desert heat gradually drives the soldiers stir-crazy. Socialized to kill, they become frustrated by the lack of combat and take out their aggression on each other and themselves. This volatile situation is only exacerbated by the appearance of actual Iraqis, who show up late in the movie and don’t stick around for long.

Near the film’s end, Swofford tells us, “Every war is different. Every war is the same.” The same apparently goes for war movies. Mendes cops the acid-trip flare lights of “Apocalypse Now” and the jittery artillery-flustered shots from “Saving Private Ryan.”

But unlike those movies, “Jarhead” does nothing to romanticize war. It never glamorizes violence—mainly because there is very little violence to glamorize. “Jarhead”’s marines fetishize combat; they treat the war movies they watch on the rec room film projector like pornos, moaning orgasmically as Martin Sheen’s helicopter swoops down on Vietnamese villages while Wagner’s “The Ride of the Valkyries” blares in the background.

But Swofford and his fellow marines never get the conflict they want to fight. When the war ends without climax, the soldiers fire their rifles in the air in a masturbatory barrage. As the soldiers go home, it’s clear the Marine Corps has been a cocktease and a cheap date; it dehumanized and psychologically damaged its men.

Although Mendes references ideas from other war movies, he donates new ones to the genre. When the soldiers march through a night lit only by oil well fires, he gives us a harrowing tableau just as apocalyptic as anything Coppola imagined.

However, Mendes is hamstrung by a weak script. Few of the characters get the development they deserve. Gyllenhaal does a serviceable job of slowly going insane, and Sarsgaard is searing; he’s far from the fey foil he usually plays. But Foxx is forced to do the best he can with a one-dimensional role and Chris Cooper is wasted as a stereotypically foul-mouthed, hard-edged officer.

“Jarhead”’s characters annoyingly avoid any mention of Bush Sr., preferring platitudes about how politics don’t matter in combat. The movie’s reluctance to explore the First Gulf War’s broader ramifications is especially bewildering now, while we’re fighting a second.

Ultimately, “Jarhead” says that war screws soldiers. Whether or not they leave Iraq in body bags, the film’s soldiers are all a little less human, a little more dead, by the movie’s end. It’s not an ambitious message, and the movie makes no attempt to condemn or justify the war itself. But when you leave the theater feeling guilty for wanting to see more violence, you might rethink the way you view war movies.