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Jarhead 3: The Siege
[Blu-ray]
Blu-ray A - America - Universal Pictures Review written by and copyright: Eric Cotenas (12th June 2016). |
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The Film
 Shuffled around from one shithole to another, Corporal Evan Albright (How to Get Away With Murder's Charlie Weber) has something to prove and has not made any friends because of it. The new guy at an American embassy in a Muslim country where Ambassador Cahill (Starship Troopers 3: Marauder's Stephen Hogan) has earned the reputation as "The Peacemaker", Evan is surprised at how lackadaisical security is with protestors at the gates on the hour, the team drunk on their off hours, and wandering freely about the surrounding village. Despite a brief service record testifying to his ability, Albright does not impress Gunnery Sergeant Raines (Hard Target 2's Scott Adkins) who correctly diagnoses Albright's problem even before he gets his team "killed" during a training scenario by abandoning his cover to take a risky shot. When he becomes suspicious of a cameraman who appears amidst the protestors every day and identifies him from the terrorist database as Khaled (Mission Impossible – Rogue Nation's Hadrian Howard), the leader of a local militia, he earns the ire of security chief Kraus (Space Marines' Ed Spila) by going over his head and taking his report directly to Cahill. He subsequently learns from data security director Olivia Winston (The Lost Girls' Sasha Jackson) that Khaled was confirmed killed in a drone strike. Taking a ribbing from his teammates, Albright starts to loosen up but cannot help being hyperaware; which turns out to be a good thing when Khaled turns out to be indeed be alive and leads an explosive siege on the embassy, taking out Kraus and his security team and several of the soldiers. With Albright, Raines, and a handful of men left – among them Sunshine (Honey's Romeo Miller aka rapper Lil' Romeo), Lopez (General Hospital's Erik Valdez), Stamper (World War Z's Joe Corrigall aping hysterical Bill Paxton in Aliens) – to protect Cahill, Olivia, secretary Rashmi (Lake Placid vs. Anaconda's Kalina Stoimenova), comic relief videography Blake (Love Don't Cost a Thing's Dante Basco), and Khaled's informant brother Jamal (Charlie de Melo), they realize that they need to arrange an extraction since Khaled and his men are not going to stop until they have totally dismantled the base. With Major Lincoln (Heat's Dennis Haysbert) and his squad miles away and Khaled's mobile phone with the contact information to dismantle his entire organization hidden in Cahill's private residence, the group realizes that they have to leave the relative safety of the bunker to retrieve the phone and seek a more practical extraction point somewhere within the war-torn city. Like its immediate sequel Jarhead 2: Field of Fire, Jarhead 3: The Siege emphasizes action over the protagonist's character development; the latter handled in an obligatory fashion compared to the Sam Mendes original as Albright has it hammered into his head by Raines that "it's not you against the world." Performances and characterization re competent but cannot support the drama, with extras dropping by the hundreds eliciting the same reaction as the deaths of major characters (apart from the slow motion reactions of Weber). Other films have depicted the sort of boredom and monotony at remote posts that cause military characters to let their guard down, but the gulf between inexperienced Albright's hyperawareness and that of his fellow officers, superiors, and the local Royal Guard – represented by jive-talking Mohammed (Wrong Turn 3: Left for Dead's Vlado Mihailov) – is staggering to the point that Albright comes across as a badass wish fulfillment character than an untested protagonist with good instincts. The first half seems to be satirizing the situation by blasting rock music during every exterior establishing shot of soldiers lounging around their posts but switches over to stereotypical Middle Eastern music just before the siege. The film is at its best in the action sequences and shakiest when philosophizing about the political, cultural, and religious situation if the viewing audience can lump Khaled in with the many other one-note foreign bad guys rather than expecting a film called Jarhead 3: The Siege to not be an identikit action film. The comic relief of Blake's motor-mouthed videographer is not too annoying but less humorous than the many scenes of the protagonists frantically running through crowds of bewildered locals – in a Sofia, Bulgaria mock-up of the Middle East bazaar not much more convincing than similar settings in seventies Bond films – before a climax set in a fast food restaurant called Freedom Burger. Haysbert turns up at the halfway mark to assert some authoritative presence from the confines of an anonymous corridor, an airplane interior, and then perhaps half a day on location; but, these days, viewers may think of him more from the Allstate commercials than his stints on The Unit or 24.
Video
Universal's Blu-ray offers a slick 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 2.40:1 widescreen presentation that sports impressive textures and detail much of the time, with CGI augmentations of gunfire and blood spatter looking sometime artificially laid over the image. The Blu-ray and DVD purport to include unrated and R-rated versions of the film and the cover states that the unrated version runs "1 Hr. 40 mins" and R-rated version as "1 Hr. 39 mins". No word on whether an authoring error has encoded the same version for both options, but even the R-rated running time listed on the back cover is ten minutes longer than the actual timing of both versions at 89:06. I found it difficult to pinpoint the differences which may consist of more or less CGI blood or the possible reduction of violence and lengthening of cutaways by as little as a few frames. Do note that the "Extra Explosive Cut" on the Universal import editions is listed as running 88:59.
Audio
Audio options include English, French, and Spanish tracks in DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 and subtitles in those languages (with an additional English SDH track). The surround mixes are busy and directional, goosing the viewer somewhat more than the rapid editing and camerawork during the action sequences.
Extras
The sole extra is the "Making Jarhead 3: The Siege" featurette (7:02) consisting of talking heads with the cast about the fun shoot and getting to play with real weapons, and their admiration for the abilities to ex-military man turned director William Kaufman (The Marine 4: Moving Target) to mount such an ambitious action film on a tight schedule and low budget (without mentioning the low cost of shooting in Bulgaria).
Overall
Universal turns yet another of its theatrical releases into a direct-to-video franchise with a script that has about as much to do with Jarhead as the Hellraiser sequels have to do with Pinhead.
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