G. I. JANE (29)

Directed by: Ridley Scott

Starring: Demi Moore, Viggo Mortensen, Anne Bancroft

The Pitch: Responding to pressure from a female Senator, the top brass allow a woman to train for the U.S. Navy SEALs.

Theo Sez: The most blatant and bizarre ode to penis-envy in many a movie year, presented as a straightforward mall movie and gussied up in post-feminist clothing - our heroine insists she doesn't want to make a statement or to be "a poster-girl for women's rights", and even the push for women's integration in the armed forces turns out (in one of the film's few effective scenes) to be politically motivated. Sisterhood, it seems, is a sham - women just want to be left alone ; but to do what, exactly? That this Jane doesn't so much compete against the Johns as become one of them doesn't seem to be a problem, least of all to the increasingly androgynous Moore, one of cinema's more inexplicable phenomena (maybe the appeal lies in her suggestion of Amazon toughness, the clenched way she delivers lines like "the more everybody fucks with me the more I'm going to gut it out!") ; the film isn't so much gender-blind as gender-neutral - it seems unaware that there are two sexes on planet Earth. Which would probably be okay (not every film - even every Ridley Scott film - can be THELMA AND LOUISE), if it weren't also so incoherent, both visually and thematically : the Navy's treatment of our heroine (doing everything to help her succeed, though they want her to fail) makes little sense, and the spectacularly-shot training scenes make even less - they're all hectic and fragmented, just murkiness and yelling (part of which is no doubt deliberate - but you don't even get a sense of how the training is organised, what being a SEAL involves). In the end it's just a glorification of soldiering, loud and simplistic, TOP GUN with a twist : confirmation yet again that, in films at least, there's nothing like the Army (or indeed the Navy) to make a man of you.