Raising Arizona (Joel Coen) [100 points / 16 votes]
Second place:
RoboCop (Paul Verhoeven) [116 points / 19 votes]
And your winner...
Full Metal Jacket (Stanley Kubrick) [133 points / 22 votes] "Almost everyone agrees that the first hour is a masterpiece. The basic training sequence (which actually runs 45 minutes, if anyone’s counting) distills Stanley Kubrick’s pet theme of dehumanization to its purest essence as Lee Ermey’s Gunnery Sergeant Hartman bullies, berates, and belittles his recruits in order to turn them into killing machines (or cannon fodder) for the Marine Corps. Ermey has made a fine living parodying his Hartman turn for 25 years now, but not even his worst efforts can blunt the impact of his corrosive, hilarious, gleefully profane performance.
The movie’s second half is more controversial. Some have even suggested that Full Metal Jacket would have been better as a short film, doing away with the Vietnam section entirely, but they’re missing the point. Kubrick’s movie is all about, as Private Joker puts it, “the duality of man - the Jungian thing.” It’s about taking that regimented, highly disciplined training and setting it loose in the most chaotic setting imaginable. With the possible exception of Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H, no other film has come closer to capturing the pitch-black comedy inherent in the military mindset. (Certainly not Mike Nichols’ neutered take on Catch-22.)
One common complaint is that Kubrick shot the Vietnam sequences in England. News flash: 2001 wasn’t shot in outer space either. The specific geography of Hue City doesn’t matter any more than the impossible layout of the Overlook Hotel in The Shining; we’re inside the mental landscape of a master filmmaker, and even if he’d traveled to the Mekong Delta itself, the baroque visuals would have still placed the movie in downtown Kubrickville.
It’s not a perfect movie. The ending is undeniably problematic, and feels like a rare failure of nerve on Kubrick’s part. It’s important to remember that Full Metal Jacket is essentially an adaptation of two different books—co-screenwriter Michael Herr’s journalistic Dispatches and Gustav Hasford’s batshit-crazy The Short-Timers. For most of its running time, the movie walks a tightrope between the two: The characters and much of the jargon-heavy dialogue are Hasford’s, while many specific observations, such as the soldier explaining how he can shoot women and children (“You just don’t lead ‘em so much!”) are Herr’s. In the end, Kubrick doesn’t follow Hasford far enough down the path to insanity; in the book, after Joker kills the female sniper, Animal Mother cuts off her head and he and the Lusthog Squad play soccer with it. Kubrick reportedly shot this scene, but didn’t use it. Maybe it didn’t work on film, but given all that’s come before it, Joker’s moral dilemma falls a little flat (especially since it really wasn’t much of a dilemma at all).
Still, Kubrick provides an appropriately hellish backdrop for the climax, and the scenes leading up to the confrontation with the sniper contain some of the most harrowing “you are there” combat footage ever shot. And if Full Metal Jacket isn’t perfect, it’s still head-and-shoulders above any of the other Vietnam movies released around the same time, including Oliver Stone’s Oscar-winning Platoon. More than that, it’s the sort of singular vision that retains its power even after a quarter-century. As long as there are wars and young people being sent to fight them, Full Metal Jacket will remain as fresh and fascinating as it was in 1987." - Scott Von Doviak
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