'G.I. Jane': Demi Grunts, You Bear It

"G.I. Jane" watches with admiration and not a little sadism as a female Seal recon team candidate takes a whipping and keeps on kicking -- butt, that is. She also shoots, kills and blows things up. Is this a great country or what?

The director of this stylized quasi-feminist mayhem is Ridley Scott, who has a thing for armed women ("Thelma & Louise," don't you know, as well as Sigourney Weaver's Ripley in "Alien.") A legendary visual stylist, Scott doesn't tell a story so much as attach electrodes to your brain and zap it into your central nervous system at high voltage. That tingle you feel as you leave the theater is merely the onset of post-combat stress syndrome, as amplified by oxygen debt.

All this is not to say the film is good, merely that it's effective. It's so jazzily cut and so driven by music that it's not much more than "Flashdance" with machine guns. It doesn't even take its own argument too seriously. In fact, it can't really be said to be agitprop for full sexual integration of the combat forces as much as an anecdote about the potential of one exceptional woman who takes her crusade so seriously that she skips on the gender-norming adjustments that a politically correct military allows in physical performance standards for female trainees. In that way, "G.I. Jane" is brilliantly packaged to embrace all and alienate none of the perspectives on this thorny issue.

Demi Moore, buff and ripped as Xena but with some actual electrical energy behind her eyes signifying mental activity, is a career naval intelligence officer thwarted by her gender as she seeks to climb the ladder. Lacking combat experience, she'll never run with the big dogs. When an obstreperous senator (Anne Bancroft) pressures the Navy into integrating a woman into the testosterone-crazed Seal teams, Moore's Jordan O'Neil is chosen to head to a naval special warfare installation and begin the intense training.

This, it should be noted, isn't straight Seal training, but even further up the elite pyramid of special operations culture: la creme de la creme, the CRT -- combined reconnaissance team. But according to Scott's take, what it seems to specialize in isn't recon of the sea, air or land, but recon of the soul, achieved by acquainting the trainees with the textures of despair, pain, fatigue and their own infernal nothingness. The candidates must be destroyed before they can be reformed in the image of the compleat Seal: resourceful, cunning, impervious to pain, committed to mission and a master of close-quarter battle.

In nine and a half weeks, O'Neil is tied, beaten, held underwater, soaked in mud, PT'ed, tongue-lashed and finally cursed halfway to Hell and back. She not only perseveres but becomes almost radiant in her suffering; her hair self-shorn to sexless fuzz, her face a purple tapestry of welts and bruises, she seems as though she should be strapped to a cross, not an M-249 automatic weapon. There's something a little creepy in the way the movie dishes it out and seems to celebrate the visuals of the agony traced in hemorrhage and abrasion on her skin.

You've seen this before. You saw it when it starred John Wayne as Sgt. Stryker in "Sands of Iwo Jima." You saw it when it starred Jack Webb and it was called "The D.I." You saw it when it was called "An Officer and a Gentleman," and starred Louis Gossett Jr.

But "G.I. Jane" does add a new element. Now, instead of the world simply being composed of ueber- and untermensch, there're the powerful, disorienting pheromones of sex in the air. She is woman, hear her roar; try not to notice her boobs. The closed men's locker room rife with the stench of sweat, gun lube and bourbon has been penetrated by the one thing to which it is vulnerable.

The representative of that cult is a masculine phantasmagoria named Command Master Chief Jack Urgayle, played behind pale killer's eyes, hawklike cheekbones and a fallen intellectual's Faustian fury by Viggo Mortensen.

The relationship between Mortensen's chief and Moore's first lieutenant is the fascinating core of the movie. One feels the sexual electricity between them: He hates what she represents even as he admires who she is, and she appreciates the blood and pain and courage he spent in gaining his wisdom, but fears his cruelty, his virility and his willingness to commit violence. It's impossible, of course, but they both want each other; as fellow alphas, they own genes coded to interbreed.

Getting by the issue of sexual attraction is the lieutenant's triumph. She is willing entirely to play by men's rules and to survive or falter by them. She never destroys them by laughing at the stupidity of their games or playing her own games; she plays by their rules, to win, as when, after a particularly brutal hand-to-hand encounter with the chief, she's able to signify her ultimate acceptance of their view of themselves by unleashing the deepest of male insults. It's a great, satisfying audience moment, but on the way home you may be ashamed at yourself for hooting so hard. After all, the movie is arguing: If you can't beat them, become them.

Unfortunately, you can guess where it's all headed; plot originality is not "G.I. Jane's" strong suit. After some nasty D.C.-style down-and-dirty infighting, its last, lamest move is to contrive to turn a training mission into the real thing and actually insert the newly minted Seal into a hokey job on the Libyan mainland. Thin, thin, thin.

This, of course, signifies the last stage in O'Neil's development and her passage into that most exclusive of masculine worlds, the most jealously guarded of all the kinds of man's work: killing. But Scott takes from her the ultimate test of that -- the close-in business with a knife on the sentry that is the commando's most brutal skill. And his later vision of a hot, dirty firefight in the Libyan arroyos is the most generic thing in a movie that has heretofore found astonishing visual poetry in the most banal of military subject matter. It's about on a level with any routine episode of "Combat" from the '60s. Scott should have looked at Bernhard Wicki's terrifyingly intimate account of infantry battle in "The Bridge" or Phil Karlson's in "Hell to Eternity." Those guys knew how to put you in it; Ridley Scott can only show you how it looked on TV 30 years ago.

G.I. Jane is rated R for profanity and extreme brutality toward women.