A Few Good Men

Unlike most people, I can't really watch the same movies over and over again. That's why I rarely purchase DVDs and why my personal movie collection stands at fewer than 10 films. But one movie that I've never gotten tired of since its 1992 release is A Few Good Men, written by Aaron Sorkin -- the man behind such hit television series as Sports Night, The West Wing, and the new show Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip.

A Few Good Men is a military court drama that features an all-star cast of some of Hollywood's biggest stars: Tom Cruise, Jack Nicholson, Demi Moore, Kevin Bacon, Kiefer Sutherland, J.T. Walsh, and Kevin Pollak all have major roles in the film, and Sorkin's script does a wonderful job of making sure that these fine actors get to do the most with their time on the screen.

The film opens with what appears to be a hazing incident at the United States military installation at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. A Marine named Santiago died as the result of some private "discipline" issued by the other men in his unit. Two soldiers, Pfc. Louden Downey and Lance Corporal Harold Dawson, are arrested and charged with murder in the crime. The two men insist they were simply following orders and that there was reason to believe they would have suffered adverse repercussions if they didn't obey the orders.

The military court assigns naval officer Lt. Daniel Kaffee (played by Cruise) to defend the two accused men. Kaffee is portrayed as a carefree kind of guy that has never seen the inside of a courtroom because he has a habit of arranging plea deals for all of his defendants. He's not sure why he was assigned a murder case, but he doesn't seem interested in asking questions about it, either.

One person that does start asking questions is fellow naval officer and attorney JoAnne Galloway (Moore). She believes that the Marines charged with the crime may be taking the fall for someone higher up, and she wants Kaffee to investigate the case thoroughly instead of settling for a light, six-month sentence offered by prosecuting officer Jack Ross (Bacon) in return for guilty pleas. But Kaffee is more interested in preserving his spotless trial record and not risking a confrontation in the courts.

Then Galloway gets herself directly involved in the case by convincing Pfc. Downey's aunt to hire her as the young man's attorney. Soon enough, Galloway teams up with Kaffee and his partner Lt. Sam Weinberg (Pollack) on the case. The three take a quick trip to Guantanamo Bay just to give the crime scene a cursory look and to meet with the commanding officers of the base: Col. Nathan Jessup (Nicholson), Lt. Jonathan Kendrick (Sutherland), and Lt. Col. Matthew Markinson (Walsh). All three men maintain that Dawson and Downey were acting on their own in the hazing incident and that they ordered everyone on the base to stay away from Santiago.

But Kaffee senses that something is not quite right with the commanding officers, though he couldn't put his finger on it at the time. The result of that trip was that he decided to go ahead and take the case to court, so the rest of the film deals with Kaffee, Galloway, and Weinberg chasing down various leads, talking to various witnesses, and trying to reconstruct what happened on that deadly night. The final courtroom scene was amazingly acted by Cruise and Nicholson, and doesn't lose its impact no matter how many times I've seen the movie.

I usually don't like Tom Cruise movies, but I have to admit that he was very good in his role as Lt. Kaffee. Nicholson was superb, and earned a Best Supporting Actor nomination for his portrayal of Col. Jessup. Moore and Weinberg, who also have a good amount of screen time, held their own and complemented the Kaffee character excellently.

I thought the plot was very engrossing. Sorkin made it pretty clear from the start that the two accused men were innocent, so that wasn't the main problem. The whole point of the film was to show how the lawyers worked to try to punch holes in the official story in order to clear their clients' names. In that respect, I thought Sorkin generated a lot of drama and a lot of tense moments, even though there weren't any major plot twists to speak of. In other words, it was straightforward storytelling, which is something that Sorkin excels at.

Director Rob Reiner also deserves a lot of credit for turning A Few Good Men into a nominee for Best Picture of the year at the 1993 Oscars. He was able to get tremendous performances out of his actors and did a nice job with the cinematography. I don't like it when directors try to get too fancy with camera angles and unorthodox shots; I prefer movies where that kind of thing takes a back seat to the actual story. Reiner recognized that he had both a strong script and a few of the most talented actors of our time on board this project, and let those assets go to work for him. The result speaks for itself.

If you're looking for a compelling, intelligent, edge-of-your-seat courtroom drama, then look no further than A Few Good Men. Even though this movie is nearly 15 years old, it has held up remarkably well over that time and is still an enjoyable film.