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A Radicalized Courtroom Drama With Sorkin-ian Expertise-- A Few Good Men

Updated: Jun 22, 2023

There are those movies that you suddenly find maybe in the on-sale $5 bins, or at a very low price on VOD, or maybe you were going through the filmography of your favorite actor and went, "Huh, I never heard of this. Maybe I'll check it out." And thus, you find one of the best, criminally underrated, wildly under-appreciated movies and you ask yourself, "How come I never saw this before?" Such was the case for me when I had the biggest fortune of my cinephilic life to stumble upon one such movie that boasts one of my favorite actors ever, Tom Cruise. Directed by Rob Reiner and a masterclass of a screenplay by the great Aaron Sorkin himself, "A Few Good Men" remains a wonder-striking of a movie that I don't see being talked about that much, and it cuts away at my soul deeper than any breakup has ever done. Today, in this sort of a love letter than my usual reviews, I want to delve into why A Few Good Men is so good and so charismatically striking and an all-around masterfully crafted movie.





When two U.S Marines are charged with the murder of another Marine at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba, their ticket to proof of innocence is military lawyer Daniel Kaffee, a hotshot plea bargain officer who undergoes his own arc of origin and becomes an honorable defense lawyer.


Rob Reiner makes guest the audience to a visually impressive parade in an equally and volumetrically spacious and ostentatious army courtyard. And then he slowly exposes them to the corruption and glorification that lies underneath the U.S Marines, or at least, the post led by Colonel Nathan Jessup. What follows next is 2 hours of excellent dialogue exchange, riveting trial drama, the expertly realized arcs of lovable and charming characters. The ideological battle between Kaffee and Jessup is as entertaining as it is captivating, which is a lot. And like all the other classic 80's and 90's movies, A Few Good Men also has fairly straightforward character arcs and the typical black-and-white distinction of good and bad, resulting in dramatic conflicts with the audience having a very clear knowledge of who to side with, unlike the more complex moral ambiguity found in a lot of content nowadays, which is certainly not a bad thing, because Reiner and Sorkin crafted the perfect screenplay and direction for the characters.





Speaking of characters, the cast is filled with gems. Tom Cruise, Demi Moore and Jack Nicholson are the main drive of the story, with a slew of charming and also some scrupulous supporting characters who give this movie a great depth, charm, nuance and fidelity. Cruise is excellent as Kaffee, he perfectly embodies the cocky junior officer who eventually becomes a respectful defense lawyer. Jack Nicholson is astoundingly good as the corrupt and hot-headed Colonel Jessup. And the ideological battle they have throughout the movie since the very introduction of Jessup, is riveting, captivating, tense, layered with a good heft of very convincing acting. And it is even more impressive when you think about it that Cruise was a fairly newbie actor acting against giants like Nicholson. While nowadays, Cruise is known for the action feat he helms, he was equally talented in the more dramatic roles pre-2000. His drama days, while full of unmissable gems, remain under-talked about due to his commitment to stunt-driven action movies. Demi Moore is also very very telling in the shoes of Commander JoAnne Galloway. Her character was the perfect totem for Kaffee to learn from and grow with.


And now, let's talk about the man of the house.

Aaron Sorkin.

My God, this guy. He knows how to write a screenplay, he knows how to write dialogues. Exposition, conflict, planning, resolution, gossip, you name it, Sorkin will find a way to make these equally trivial or gargantuan scenes iconic and riveting with tantamount substance.

Take every rare gemstones, jewels, valuable stones, put them in a blender and what you get is Sorkin's dialogues. There are so many scenes in A Few Good Men that rigorously depend on the dialogues of said scenes and were they not written tactfully and expertly by Sorkin, they would have failed and in turn, the movie would have dipped in quality by a scarily large margin. His dialogues also give the movie a level of rewatchability. I often go back and rewatch, at least if not the whole movie, scenes of "A Few Good Men", "The Social Network", "Steve Jobs" for the excellent dialogues they boast.


All in all, A Few Good Men is a rare gemstone that I was very lucky to have the luxury of watching and also the heartbreak of not seeing it as much talked about as it should be. Reiner, Sorkin and Cruise have crafted a classic dialogue-driven drama. Courtroom drama enthusiasts won't want to miss this treat. A Few Good Men is a classic trial tale of good and bad and it has made a special place in my heart for the many years to come.

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