Top 100 Movies Of The 1990's: #13 A Few Good Men

Box Office: $141.3 Million Dollars

Oscar Nominations: Best Picture, Best Supporting Actor (Jack Nicholson), Best Film Editing, Best Sound Mixing

Oscar Wins: None

MovieRankings.Net: 87/100

Available To Stream: AMC+, Amazon Prime Video

A Few Good Men is the first movie Aaron Sorkin ever wrote. It was based on a play he had written in 1988. The script was so good that it sold to Hollywood before the play ever debuted. It's still wild to me over thirty years later that this didn't get nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay. It's not like there wasn't room. Scent Of A Woman got screenplay nomination for fuck's sake!

It's that incredible screenplay that puts this movie into the stratosphere of the best courtroom movie ever for me. It's the opposite of The Verdict. In that movie, Paul Newman elevates it into greatness. Don't get me wrong, The Verdict had a brilliant script by David Mamet but Newman's performance is one of the best ever. He makes you care about and believe in someone that we really shouldn't. In A Few Good Men, you had some really fantastic acting across the board but it's the dialogue that is the biggest takeaway for me.

It's always clear who the good guys and bad guys are in this. I don't want to paint a picture that's more complex than it really is but one thing I do appreciate in A Few Good Men is that the motive is so well explained. Jack Nicholson is perfect and so believable as Col. Jessup. He also makes some fair counterpoints to the ideal perspective coming from Kaffee (Tom Cruise). Who are we to judge something we don't understand? As Americans, we all want safety and the military to provide that. But then, is it also fair to criticize or judge how we achieve that safety? Jessup believes we can't have it both ways.

Jessup is obviously wrong in that overarching black and white belief but there is nuance here. In A Few Good Men, Private Santiago dies. You can't be having young men die under our watch but when you are training people to go into war, this isn't going to be cuddles and kisses. I love an intelligent movie where you have have discussions like this afterwards. This is a complicated and pretty evergreen issue. I think that's why it feels more modern than a 30 year old movie should.

A lot of that credit should also go to director Rob Reiner. This is his absolute peak and it's at the end of an amazing run that started with Stand By Me in 1986 and included A Princess Bride, When Harry Met Sally, (#41) Misery and this. He would also direct An American President a couple years later but he lost his touch after that. But in that 1986-92 run, there weren't many better directors.  I feel like when the independent directors took over after 1994 and it became more of a director-first medium as opposed to a studio-led one for the rest of the 90's, Reiner couldn't quite keep up. 

Sidney Baldwin. Shutterstock Images.

I've glossed over the great acting in this and that's pretty unfair. This is Demi Moore's best work. She's also idealistic but believable. You felt like you were in the room when Cruise, Moore and Kevin Pollack were trying to figure out how to tackle this case. Kevin Bacon gives yet another great 1990's performance here. He's not just some evil guy. He's actually a good guy doing his job and has his reasons for doing so. You also have great character actors like JT Walsh, Christopher Guest and Keifer Sutherland nailing this great dialogue. 

A Few Good Men does the impossible. It's a courtroom movie that's exciting. It has this big, loud characters that are believable and have some nuance. It's about the military, which most people are not actively involved in, but allows everyone watching it to have an opinion.

I know it's cliche but they really don't make movies like this anymore. Now, the country is even more divided and anything to do with military or the courtroom has political undertones. Look at The Trial Of The Chicago 7 (written and directed by Sorkin). It's so one-sided and needs to paint certain characters as bumbling idiots and/or evildoers. 

Because A Few Good Men shows these characters as actual human beings doing things for reasons they truly deem correct is why this movie is just as interesting now as when it came out.

13. A Few Good Men

14. The Fugitive

15. The Truman Show

16. Fargo

17. Swingers

18. Reservoir Dogs

19. There's Something About Mary

20. Sleepers

21. Schindler's List

22. Rushmore

23. Fight Club

24. Saving Private Ryan

25. True Romance

26. Dumb & Dumber

27. Kingpin

28. Donnie Brasco

29. Heat 

30. Terminator 2: Judgement Day

31. Rounders

32. Unforgiven

33. Trainspotting

34. The Game

35. Out Of Sight

36. Carlito's Way

37. Seven

38. L.A. Confidential

39. Speed

40. Gattaca

41. Misery

42. Tombstone

43. Ransom

44. Wayne's World

45. The Insider

46. Back To The Future Part III

47. A Bronx Tale

48. The People Vs. Larry Flynt

49. Eyes Wide Shut

50. The Sandlot

51. Happy Gilmore

52. Contact

53. The Green Mile

54. Man On The Moon

55. Boyz N The Hood

56. Grosse Pointe Blank

57. Independence Day

58. The Rainmaker

59. Go

60. The Firm

61. Magnolia

62. The Talented Mr. Ripley

63. Tommy Boy

64. The Usual Suspects

65. In The Line Of Fire

66. My Cousin Vinny

67. Awakenings

68. JFK

69. Toy Story

70. Home Alone

71. Jerry Maguire

72. Titanic

73. Billy Madison

74. Apollo 13

75. Braveheart

76. Edward Scissorhands

77. Cape Fear

78. The River Wild

79. What's Eating Gilbert Grape?

80. 12 Monkeys

81. Stir Of Echoes

82. Mission: Impossible

83. Total Recall

84. Quiz Show

85. For Love Of The Game

86. Being John Malkovich

87. Men In Black

88. Scream

89. Alive

90. Three Kings

91. Glengarry Glen Ross

92. Die Hard With A Vengeance

93. The Blair Witch Project

94. Twister

95. Dirty Work

96. Election

97. Tremors

98. Any Given Sunday

99. The Wedding Singer

100. Clerks