Stanley Kubrick brilliant. Then the film degenerates into a masterpiece." Roger Ebert was not particularly impressed with it, awarding it a mediocre 2.5 out of 4. He concluded: "Stanley Kubrick's "Full Metal Jacket" is more like a book of short stories than a novel", a "strangely shapeless film from the man whose work usually imposes a ferociously consistent vision on his material". Kubrick's final film was "Eyes Wide Shut" (1999), starring Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman as a Manhattan couple on a sexual odyssey. Tom Cruise portrays a doctor who witnesses a bizarre masked quasireligious orgiastic ritual at a country mansion, a
Tom Cruise and "The Last Samurai" can also be considered to be part of this formula. "Widescreenings" noted that for Tom Cruise's character Daniel Kaffee in "A Few Good Men", "[screenwriter] Aaron Sorkin interestingly takes the opposite approach of "Top Gun", where Cruise also starred as the protagonist. In "Top Gun", Cruise plays Mitchell who is a 'hot shot' military underachiever who makes mistakes because he is trying to outperform his late father. Where Maverick Mitchell needs to rein in the discipline, Daniel Kaffee needs to let it go, finally see what he can do." Sorkin and director Rob Reiner are praised