The suck hits DVD

"Jarhead" is not a war movie. It's even less of a war movie than "Three Kings," "Apocalypse Now," "The Deer Hunter" or "Full Metal Jacket" (which it most resembles). "Jarhead" is a movie about military indoctrination, conflicting moralities and under British director Sam Mendes' deft direction, it's a poignant statement about the current state of our military and its follies in the deserts of the Middle East.\nBased on former Marine Anthony Swofford's book about his experiences in bootcamp, Kuwait and Iraq in the first Gulf War, "Jarhead" nimbly avoids preachy politics, instead focusing on the effect the military, during wartime, has on the mind of the individual. Jake Gyllenhaal, capping off a red-letter year which included an Oscar-worthy performance as Jack Twist in "Brokeback Mountain," embodies Swofford with a bewildered fire in his eyes, a man forever scarred by his actions and lack of action in a war he doesn't fully understand.\nPeter Sarsgaard adds yet another mildly disturbing character to his cannon as Swofford's friend Allen Troy, but it's Jamie Foxx who steals the show during his limited screen time as Staff Sgt. Sykes, a performance combining the intensity and sharp tongue of "Full Metal Jacket's" Gunnery Sgt. Hartman with the undeniable compassion of Tom Hank's Captain Miller in "Saving Private Ryan."\nBoth single and double-disc versions of "Jarhead" are available, with the single-disc containing a glut of mostly curious deleted scenes with director commentary, more of Swofford's fantasy sequences from the film and two full-length commentary tracks, one from Mendes and the other from screenwriter William Broyles Jr. and Anthony Swofford himself. The double-disc collector's edition contains all features found on the single-disc, as well as the documentaries "Jarhead Diaries," "Background" and "Semper Fi: Life After the Corps." The diaries are personal accounts of life on the set from the cast and are mostly disposable. "Background" concerns stories of the real Marines who starred as extras in the film, and "Semper Fi" is a series of interviews with former Marines, some yawn-inducing and some emotionally affecting, in which they discuss their lives after leaving the Corps.\nThere are individual scenes in "Jarhead" that boast the weight of most entire films, such as Swofford's mental breakdown at the expense of a timid fellow soldier or a climactic scene in which Swofford and Troy finally have an Iraqi in their cross-hairs after months upon months of training and waiting. Roger Deakins' cinematography is also of particular note, as his camera perfectly captures the bleakness of the desert by day and the haunting quality of the desert by night, oil wells burning like surreal signal fires.\nWith "American Beauty" and "Road to Perdition" already under his belt, Sam Mendes joins the likes of P.T. Anderson, Wes Anderson, Spike Jonze, Sofia Coppola and Darren Aronofsky as 40-years-or-younger directors with as of yet spotless track records.