Heartbreak Ridge (1986)

Directed by Clint Eastwood. Starring Clint Eastwood, Mario Van Peebles, Marsha Mason, Everett McGill, Moses Gunn, Arlen Dean Snyder, Boyd Gaines, Bo Svenson, Mark Mattingly, Vincent Irizarry, Ramón Franco, Mike Gomez, Peter Koch, Tom Villard, Richard Venture. [R]

Grizzled, gravel-voiced Marine vet Eastwood gets transferred back to his old military unit, whips a platoon of insolent slackers into shape, reconciles with his ex-wife (Mason) working as a waitress at a nearby bar. B-movie material given A-movie treatment; the script is still a pile of clichés and stock characters, but has plenty of choice one-liners and Eastwood’s impregnable squinting glower. The scenes with Mason slow things down instead of provide relief from the standard-issue service drama plot—this overlong film would have benefited from tighter, more merciless editing—and it’s hard to get worked up for the climactic scenes where the boys go off to battle considering that it’s the Invasion of Grenada that the filmmakers are recreating (heck, they may have been better off “inventing” a nondescript conflict like Top Gun did earlier that year). Less of Van Peebles’ fast-talking wannabe rock star would have also helped. The only one of Eastwood’s many war films where he both starred and directed.

55/100