Close-Order Moral Drill

TITLE: A FEW GOOD MEN

DIRECTOR: ROB REINER

WRITER: AARON SORKIN

THE BOTTOM LINE: Good direction and acting turn an old-fashioned melodrama into a wickedly entertaining movie.

A Few Good Men opens with an elite Marine drill team, resplendent in dress blues, executing spectacular variations on the manual of arms. In itself an entrancing sequence, it comes to symbolize something more as the film develops.

For one thing, director Rob Reiner's realization of this passage is an omen of all the crispness to come in an extraordinarily well-made movie, which wastes no words or images in telling a conventional but compelling...

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