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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mel O&#039;Drama" data-source="post: 434797" data-attributes="member: 23">A Few Good Men (1992) <img src="https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.popoptiq.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2011%2F05%2Fa-few-good-men-movie-poster-1992-1020191902.jpg&f=1&nofb=1&ipt=4135a925cb7e0ce1c344d37f89ebe1a696bb050fb2b5bdb20024ef98128a1baf" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="" />Yet another classic I'm only just getting round to watching. I knew a few things about this: Jack Nicholson; Tom Cruise; military court marshal; "I want the truth"/"You can't handle the truth".  Oh, and Larry Hagman appeared in some role as a judge or something. Turns out I had all but one correct.I'm not sure why I didn't watch this years ago. Perhaps it's the length. Perhaps it's the genre. Perhaps it's because Demi Moore is in it. Actually, she's pretty good here, there were a couple of her lines that made me laugh out loud, especially when her character makes a complete knorrs-up of asking her superior if she could be assigned after rehearsing her request so meticulously.  Kevin Pollak is very watchable as well, and adds a gravitas and sense of experience to the main triad (Cruise/Moore/Pollak). Seeing them standing together in the courtroom, though, I couldn't help wondering if both Moore and Pollak were selected because they were shorter than Tom Cruise (and I think the gap looked even bigger than it actually is).Interesting that Tom Cruise got top billing here, over Jack Nicholson (and did I imagine his credit was slightly larger as well?). I found Cruise's character very annoying at times. I think this is partly intentional, and wondered if they were going for a Columbo sort of vibe with his initial introduction as a bumbling kid who appeared to not know much about his own business, therefore setting us up to be surprised by the end. Intentional or otherwise, though, sometimes annoying is just annoying. It's also the one role where I found myself wondering how another actor might play it. Nicholson inhabited his character completely, but Cruise - even though he brings the requisite arrogance - felt more reliant on busy body language, gesticulating, raising his voice or distractions such as noisy eating and apple or throwing a baseball bat round to hold the attention. It's a perfectly serviceable performance, but there's nothing in it that feels great, and it's animated almost to the point of caricature (some might even say ham). It's also difficult to imagine the character being able to truly hold his own against Nicholson's, which at least helps sell the story, even if I had to suspend disbelief when it came to the outcome. In my mind, [ISPOILER]Nicholson's character would have been far too disciplined to have been goaded into confessing, even if it helped that I fully believed Cruise's character rubs people up the wrong way and used that to his advantage here. [/ISPOILER] In the end, what we got was so satisfying that I accepted it. The rest of the cast is a who's who of small and large screen actors of the era: there's Kevin Bacon; Kiefer Sutherland; Cuba Gooding Jr.; the good-looking one from Twin Peaks, the good-looking one from ER...This was the recently-departed Rob Reiner's follow-up to Misery, which followed up When Harry Met Sally. What a time this would have been for him, with hit after hit. It's produced by none other than David Brown which immediately elevated it in my mind, and it met expectations. Aaron Sorkin's screenwriting must also get credit for giving such a solid and compelling film.The two hours and twenty minutes went by very quickly (mercifully, there were no ad breaks on Prime, which is always a bit of a lottery, so that helped as well).</blockquote>

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