'G.I. Jane': Naval Envy

See Jane run. See Jane jump. See Jane pump. See Jane -- oh, hell, see "Jane" and be done with it.

"G.I. Jane" is, let us be frank, pure post-feminist junk-food entertainment, a cliche-ridden muddle of Sgt. Glory and Gloria Steinem. It’s just another comic book on film, one that plays both ends against the middle -- drop your logic duffel at the door -- and makes no serious attempt to hide the guy wires.

That said, compared to the rest of the summer’s star-charged shoot-’em-ups, "G.I. Jane" is about as good as it gets, with a lot of small guilty pleasures and not many more annoyances than you would reasonably expect from a script so dependent on stereotypes that the token black recruit -- named McCool -- tells the token woman, "See, O’Neil, I know where you’re coming from. . .you’re just the new nigger" in the prejudice game.

If you somehow have missed the heavy promo campaign, or can’t simply work it out from the phrase " ‘G.I. Jane’ starring Demi Moore," it’s the guts-and-green-beret saga of Lt. Jordan O’Neil, determined to be the first woman to make it through the ultra-rigorous training of an ultra-secret Navy SEAL strike force made up of ultra-elites from the combined services (which is how the scriptwriters get away with giving a naval intelligence officer an army handle). Jordan, who has hit the Navy’s glass ceiling because she has been denied combat duty, becomes the bargaining chip between the powerful woman head of the Senate armed forces subcommittee (Anne Bancroft) -- who presumably believes women should make it in the services -- and the unscrupulous candidate for Secretary of the Navy, who doesn’t.

When the going gets tough, you know who gets going, though you also have to swallow that a woman tough enough to work her way up to one-arm, spraddle push-ups in a matter of weeks, in and around 20 hours a day of bone-cracking make-’em-quit drills, wouldn’t have beat the system already. Nevertheless, Moore’s grim face, which in its square-jawed androgyny has always looked better in uniforms, is one of the film’s surprising strengths: It’s perfect combat-cartoon material, especially once she shaves her head.

The other main thing the movie has going for it is director Ridley Scott, master of the half-light ("The Duellists," "Blade Runner," "Alien," "White Squall"), whose poetic use of smoke, shadow and miasma makes one wonder if he has visual problems. (And looking at Moore, one also can’t help being reminded of the shaven-headed and muscle-baring woman warrior Sigourney Weaver of the later "Alien" period.)

A good three-quarters of the film races along, highlighted by a truly hallucinatory night-fight training sequence and intermittently punctuated by the predictable stogie-smoking colonel, the hard-as-nails drill instructor (Viggo Mortensen) spouting D.H. Lawrence, locker-jock resentment, back-stabbing, etc. But in the last lap, the cliches go double-time: Navy department bigwigs question her "fraternizing" with other women officers ("We can’t ask you that") and in an emergency real-life assignment, the drill sergeant, who not long ago beat O’Neil to a bloody pulp to expose the potentially dangerous overprotectiveness of her male colleagues, suddenly becomes overprotective himself and puts them both in harm’s way (thus giving her the chance to make the key heroic gesture, naturally).

Since Jane/Jordan is both symbol and modern me-for-myself anti-symbol, even the few good women aren’t always good: The woman senator, played by Anne Bancroft as a weird cross between Olympia Dukakis and Geraldine Ferraro, is scarcely a "woman" at all, but a female suit -- just another politician corrupted by power (though Bancroft’s over-the-top performance is another of the guilty pleasures). O’Neil, who insists on erasing double standards, secretly loves to smoke cigars herself and finally wins over her company not by being the best at everything, though of course she is, but by spewing from her bloody mouth a very male (physically impossible, in fact) vulgarity.

Hey, what did you expect?

G.I. JANE (R) — Contains some vulgar language and some pretty intense violence.