Movie Critique

A Few Good Men Movie Critique

RadioRebel

The movie I chose was A Few Good Men. This movie was directed by Rob Reiner and featured, Tom Cruise, Jack Nicholson and Demi Moore. The bias in A Few Good Men is that two Marines were ordered to give another Marine a ‘Code Red’. A Code Red in the Marines is an illegal punishment. This film is based on true historical events. However, the movie is lacking historical truth. The filmmakers stretched the truth many times. In the movie, the victim of the Code Red died, but in the actual event the victim did not die. Also in the movie there were only two Marines that were being accused but in the actual event there were seven Marines being accused.

In A Few Good Men, Lieutenant Kaffee, who has a history of plea bargains, gets assigned the case of Private First Class Louden Downey and Lance Corporal Harold Dawson. Downey and Dawson are accused of killing a fellow Marine, PFC William Santiago. Lieutenant Kaffee reviews their case and tells them they should take a plea bargain. Downey and Dawson reuse to take the plea bargain, saying they were given direct orders and they did nothing wrong. Lieutenant Kaffee gets upset and wants to resign as their attorney the next day in court. Kaffee shows up to court the next day and to his defense team’s surprise, he pleads not guilty. Kaffee and his defense team only have three weeks to gather enough evidence to prove that Downey and Dawson are not guilty.

I liked the movie. My favorite part was when Galloway was leaving Kaffee’s house and when she stepped outside of the door she turned around to say something to Kaffee and he interupted her. He told her that he knew they had both said things to each other in the past that they didn’t mean and that she didn’t have to tell him she liked him that he already knew. Then Galloway replied with, “I was just going to tell you we got this” and left. I thought that was funny. The only thing I didn’t like about the movie is that Kaffee didn’t believe that he could win. He said that he would just keep improvising but in the long run they would end up losing. I believe that the casting for this movie was amazing. I believe this because Kaffe was supposed to be a young inexperienced attorney and Tom Cruise played his part very well. He was young at the time and he had the right facial expressions and the right tone of voice for it. The Marines were also cast very well. The men who played the Marines honestly looked a lot like actual Marines. They were buff and just had the cocky attitudes like Marines have. Also the decision to cast Demi Moore as Galloway was a very good decision. In the movie Demi is playing a very independant, honest, smart woman. I believe that she played it very well.

This movie ties into what we learned about court in class. We learned how a court room is set up and how court cases work. In the movie there was a lot of time spent in the courtroom. There was also a lot of questioning going on. You can learn a lot about American government and law from this movie. You learn the process lawyers and attorneys go through while working a case. It shows how hard it can be. It also shows that everyone is innocent until proven guilty. In the beginning Kaffee thought that his clients were guilty but at the end it turns out they weren’t.

In my opinion I think that this movie did help me understand law a little better than I did before, I am the type of person that has to actually see something being done to fully understand it. So seeing a court case and seeing what the lawyers go through helped me a lot. Some things that occurred in the movie that I already knew about was the questioning process and the court layout. I knew how the court was supposed to be set up because I learned it in class. I also knew about the questioning process because I sometimes watch law and order.