"The inspection"

moves in an often trodden territory, where a sensitive soul must make it through the Marine Corps' ego-killing basic training.

Countless are the madly screaming sergeants and fanboys who have invoked lower powers in elaborately porky harangues.

It's penalism, racism and homophobia until the auditory nerve shuts down in pure self-defense.  

This time it's about Ellis French, a gay man who has been living on the streets since the age of 16 because his crazy Christian mother doesn't want to know about him, as long as he insists on being gay.

In order to find some meaning in life, he voluntarily joins the army.

"If I'm going to die for a bullet, I better do it in a uniform," reasons Ellis, who is the alter ego of director and screenwriter Elegance Bretton.

This is

his own story, and he tells it well.

Make it something more than just another pencillist Marines fic.

Manages in its short 95 minutes to nuance the main character, meritoriously avoids the emotional junk of convention and has a brilliant Jeremy Pope (who we will soon see in the lead role in the biopic about the singer Sammy Davis Jr) in the lead role.

Pope has exactly the soft hardness that the task requires, a delicate man with a hidden capital for violence.

Ellis' antagonists are more square-shaped.

And... excuse a petite meter, but it's still a bit disturbing that Ellis has a he-man body right from the start.

Nowadays, even men are victims of beauty fixation and body obsession, which has given us an actor's troupe of well-trained muscular builds, which previously only populated the action film.

You can mostly tolerate the fact that, for example, a librarian looks like Tarzan's crazier brother, but when, as here, you note that a homeless day laborer has a "at least five days a week at the gym body" - then the illusion is broken.

If only for a moment.

Speaking of all

the Marines movies that preceded this one:


On Christmas Eve, the junkie from hell arranges a screening of "Jarhead" - the best of them all, according to him.

However, he is wrong there, namely "Full metal jacket".