Demi Moore, all curves and sinew, plays the perfect soldier-as-political-guinea-pig in a post-feminist fable that only occasionally drifts into annoying, point-making rhetoric. Built like a Russian gymnast and resembling a linebacker in autumn mud, Moore is well-paired with the whippetlike Viggo Mortensen as her bullying drill instructor. The military is presented as a brutalizing institution that's still ultimately superior to the traitorous compromises of civilian/bureaucratic/political life. As such the film's in line with Scott's Alien and Blade Runner (where corporations stake out civilians as sacrificial lambs) and also kin to Scott's last film, the boys-on-a-boat White Squall, where the lads must stick together, after tragedy, in the face of outside review. G.I. Jane flatters modern audiences in being at once as militaristic as Air Force One and as feminist as Murphy Brown ... or Scott's own Thelma & Louise. Unlike those luckless ladies, however, Moore's character is presented as so perfect she doesn't need to learn anything; she just must endure until the rest of the world acknowledges her perfection.
-- Gregg Rickman
G.I. Jane opens Friday, Aug. 22, at area theaters.
