If you love your courtroom dramas with extra cheese, oh boy, do I have a blast from the past for you. Back in 1992, when A Few Good Men was released, I feel like I thought it was sure-fire Oscar bait. Now it plays like a radio drama at best. Fun to watch, yes. But that is mostly because of the all-star roster of big name actors. I mean, come on, man….Tom Cruise, Demi Moore, Kevin Pollack, Jack Nicholson, Keifer Sutherland, Kevin Bacon, Noah Wyle, Xander Berkley….Cuba Gooding, Jr. is in there somewhere.
So, here we go, A Few Good Men, because, who doesn’t love a courtroom drama where everyone’s already guilty and the only thing left is to watch the cliches fly and the melodrama unfold?
The movie is thirty years old, but we can do this without spoilers, just in case you haven’t caught this one yet and want to be consumed by the drama.
Tom Cruise (Mission: Impossible, Tropic Thunder) plays a young JAG Naval lawyer, who hasn’t seen any action nor the inside of a courtroom, but he’s pretty, pretty good at research so he gets to defend two simp Marines charged with killing a fellow soldier because he sucked at being a soldier. Tom Cruise’s mission should he choose to accept it is to uncover the truth, that is, IF he can handle the truth.
He teams up with some other JAGs, played by Demi Moore (One Crazy Summer) and Kevin Pollack (The Usual Suspects) to defend these Marines, who claim they were “just following orders”. But whose orders? The chain of command of course begins and ends with Col. Jessup, played by The Joker himself, Jack Nicholson (Mars Attacks!).
The drama is predictable and cliched. A surprise to be sure, considering the director is Rob Reiner (This is Spinal Tap) from a script penned by Aaron Sorkin, who has won Emmys and Oscars and pretty much everything in between since this flick. But this was his first and it’s a very simple, paint by numbers courtroom farce.
But that cast. Booyah. Tom Cruise plays a cocky…..(enter profession here, in this case lawyer) and spends most of the movie trying to figure out what a real attorney actually does. Jack Nicholson plays the leader of the United States military and literally uses his limited screen time teaching everyone how to act by delivering every line with so much intensity that you almost expect him to burst into flames. Dude rocks his role. Keifer Sutherland (24, Lost Boys) shows up and says a few lines with a southern accent. It all just seems to work.
Like I said at the beginning, when I was whatever age I was when this came out 30+ years ago, I would have assumed it was an awards lock. But, no. Essentially, the art of taking a two-hour film and turning it into a two-hour exercise in strained courtroom banter. But, hey, if you like your courtroom thrillers predictable, over-the-top, and unashamedly heavy-handed, this one’s a masterpiece.
Author Bio
Tim English is a writer, author and film critic. He has been a board member of the Kansas City Film Critics Circle since 2012. He has been seen on KC Live! on KSHB, as well as KCTV-5. He is the host of the Reel Hooligans podcast and a contributor for Scene-Stealers.com. Tim is also the founder and director of the Terror on the Plains International Horror Film Festival.
