Film

G.I. Jane (1997)

Director: Ridley Scott

Movie review

From Time Out Film Guide

This humourless variant on Private Benjamin puts Moore through her paces as an intelligence officer selected as the first woman to undergo combat training with the US Navy SEALs. Everyone expects her to fail. Mortensen - the sadistic/benevolent master chief - abuses his recruits, but Demi takes it like a man. She shaves her head - a moment covered with half a dozen cameras, as if it were the helicopter attack in Apocalypse Now! All the movie lacks is real combat, so the script cooks up an excuse for a raid on Libya, where the star can celebrate the ultimate emancipation: she can kill for her country. It's a toss up what's most depressing about all this. Moore's grim self-determinism is self-defeating. She's fit all right - but an exercise video might have been more entertaining. The hardline feminism is such a reductionist position, and the basic training genre affords so little room for manoeuvre, that the picture's an irrelevance before it's even begun.

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