Filmed in the deserts of California, director Sam Mendes ("Road to Perdition," "American Beauty") brings a veritable Kuwaiti landscape to Hollywood, but fails to bring Hollywood plot credibility to the Gulf War in his latest movie, "Jarhead."

Adopted from a book of the same moniker, the biopic follows Marine Anthony Swofford (Jake Gyllenhaal) and his company from boot camp to a swift enlistment as a sniper guarding oil fields in Kuwait.

Staff Sergeant Sykes (Jamie Foxx) is in charge of whipping the representative cast of characters into shape. Ex-cons and third-generation war veterans all get the same treatment under his watchful eye. Though he participates in the expected array of penis jokes, which are actually funny, his first loyalty is to the corps and the safety of his men.

This lightheartedness and character development separates the movie from its predecessors. The characters are not the typical characters of a war movie — there is no Rambo-esque, die-hard patriot, nor are there any men who would desert their company at the first sign of trouble (at least not any who get out of boot camp).

The characters are strong in their spirits — how they deal with family issues and their cheating girlfriends abroad reveal more about them than their actions in combat do. It is not so much the dialogue as superb acting that keeps the narrative rolling.

One would expect the pace to pick up once the company was deployed, but the most action in this movie is from a different movie. The Marines watch a clip of "Apocalypse Now" as a pre-deployment morale booster.

Mendes seems to be aware of his downfalls. At moments he seems to throw his hands up in the air because of the frustrations of making a war movie and begins accentuating what he is good at — stunning visuals. Blazing oil lends some color to the otherwise monotonous desert. Purposely unfocused camera lenses illustrate the vastness of the desert. Parading his lead actor's near naked body around screen doesn't hurt either. With the exception of a well-placed Santa hat, Gyllenhaal's character adds to the narrative, as long as Mendes wasn't trying to distract from the plot holes.

A completely unexplained death and a horse in the desert blow holes into the movie almost as wide as the lack of secondary character development hurts furthering the plot, such as Swofford's dad.

In such a character-based, dialogue driven movie, there should be some obvious connections to problems Marines are facing in the desert today. Only one instance of language differences turning potentially deadly is illustrated. Also, despite the clear resonance to young marines wandering the desert who aren't sure of their identities yet, only one conversation is of actually talking about the politics of the war. It is dismissed with a succinct, "F*** politics. We're here."

"Welcome to the suck" is taken out of the usual Marine context, as the movie seems to purposefully avoid the havoc wreaked with bullets flying at the subjects from every angle in other war movies. The "suck" in this movie is the characters' loneliness and the viewers' loss of the whole cinematic experience of being placed on a chaotic battlefield in surround sound.

Grade: B