Full Metal Jacket "military mentality" in this film. He said further that the theme covered "a man testing himself against his own limitations", and he concluded: ""Full Metal Jacket" is the latest chapter in an ongoing movie which is not merely a comment on our time or a time past, but on something that reaches beyond." British critic Gilbert Adair wrote: "Kubrick's approach to language has always been reductive and uncompromisingly deterministic in nature. He appears to view it as the exclusive product of environmental conditioning, only very marginally influenced by concepts of subjectivity and interiority, by all the whims, shades and modulations
Full Metal Jacket Ermey, calling him "the film's stunning surprise ... he's so good—so obsessed—that you might think he wrote his own lines". Canby also said D'Onofrio's performance should be admired, and he called Modine "one of the best, most adaptable young film actors of his generation". Canby concluded: "Full Metal Jacket" was "a film of immense and very rare imagination". Jim Hall, writing for Film4 in 2010, awarded the film 5 out of 5 stars and added to the praise for Ermey, saying his "performance as the foul-mouthed Hartman is justly celebrated and it's difficult to imagine the film working anything like