Jake Gyllenhaal (The Day After Tomorrow, Moonlight Mile), Jamie Foxx (Ray, Collateral) and Peter Sarsgaard (Kinsey, Boys Don't Cry) star in Universal Pictures' Jarhead, the adaptation of Marine Anthony Swofford's bracing memoir that took readers into his disorienting firsthand experience in the Gulf War. Jarhead is directed by Academy Award? winner Sam Mendes (American Beauty, Road to Perdition) and the producers are Oscar? winner Doug Wick (Gladiator) and Lucy Fisher (upcoming Memoirs of a Geisha), partners in Red Wagon Entertainment. The screenplay is by William Broyles, Jr. (Cast Away, Apollo 13).

Jarhead (the self-imposed moniker of the Marines) follows "Swoff" (Gyllenhaal), a third-generation enlistee, from a sobering stint in boot camp to active duty, sporting a sniper's rifle and a hundred-pound ruck on his back through Middle East deserts with no cover from intolerable heat or from Iraqi soldiers, always potentially just over the next horizon. Swoff and his fellow Marines sustain themselves with sardonic humanity and wicked comedy on blazing desert fields in a country they don't understand against an enemy they can't see for a cause they don't fully fathom.

Foxx portrays Sergeant Sykes, a Marine lifer who heads up Swofford's scout/sniper platoon, while Sarsgaard is Swoff's friend and mentor, Troy, a die-hard member of STA-their elite Marine Unit.

An irreverent and true account of a war that was antiseptically packaged a decade ago, Jarhead is laced with dark wit, honest inquisition and episodes that are at once surreal and poignant, tragic and absurd.

score 3 outta 5