Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

Lt. Colonel "Bull" Meechum (played by Robert Duvall) is a Marine Corps fighter pilot, one of the best there is. He is also a family man, with a wife and four children. He runs his house like a military establishment, which works for him but is not necessarily ideal for the children, especially his eldest son.Good, but not great. Was set up to be a great human drama, but got sidetracked, and pulls its punches at the end. The sidetracking was due to trying to tackle one big issue too many (the issue being 1960s racism). The ending is emotional, but leaves a few things unresolved.Superb performance by Robert Duvall in the lead role. Good support from Blythe Danner and Michael O'Keefe.

I was very shocked when I saw that "The Great Santini" had an overall rating of only 7.2. Clearly, it's one of the best films of its day and it is possibly Robert Duvall's best performance.Duvall plays 'Bull' Meechum--a career officer whose life is the service. He is a Marine pilot first and last. As for his long-suffering family, they clearly don't fit in with his life. Much of the time he's off being deployed somewhere--which is tough on the family. But when he's home--it's much worse!! He treats his family like they are soldiers, but they never signed up for this sort of thing. This is a wonderful character study--very realistic, tough and memorable. Exceptionally well acted, directed and well worth seeing. While it's not always pleasant, it is always compelling.

"The Great Santini" stars Robert Duvall as Bull Meechum, an idle marine pilot without a war. Military indoctrination, boredom, bottled-up aggression, and the stresses of living up to a confused version of masculinity, result in Duvall constantly feuding with, dominating and bullying his small family. Much of the episodic film consists of a series of macho rituals between Duvall and his son, played by Michael O'Keefe.The film is structured as a coming-of-age tale, O'Keefe juggling both hate and an appreciation of his father as he negotiates his own path into manhood. It's a bombastic, explosive melodrama, but the characters are too one-dimensional – Duvall's Colonel Kilgore from "Apocalypse Now", an ogre with no off-switch, and no effort is made to explain why his obviously intelligent family sticks so close to him – and the film missteps with a last act sequence in which Meechum sacrifices his life to prevent an air-plane crashing into a residential area. This moment is designed to rehabilitate Meechum in our eyes, to portray men like him as being "needed" and "necessary" in the "war" against those who "threaten our towns". He's a hard-hearted brute, the film acknowledges, but look at his soft, good and noble side. The film is set in 1962. The Vietnam war arrives with Meechum's death, the audience now ready for a little well-meaning murder, rape and pillaging.The film makes several interesting links between sports and warfare, and gives Meechum's daughter, played by Lisa Jane Persky, a number of good lines. She's constantly taunting her father, weaselling her way under his skin and getting away with it.7.9/10 – Worth one viewing for Duvall's scenery chewing. No alcoholic, abusive man who has faced disciplinary charges would be granted the opportunity to fly a fighter jet today. The air-force likes well mannered killers.

In "A Few Good Men," Rob Reiner's exuberant shredding of the U. S. Marine Corps, Jack Nicholson is the colonel on the witness stand who makes this hot but fatuous speech. "You don't want to admit it but you NEED me on that wall!" He's talking about the wall that separates the U.S. community in Guantanamo from the rest of the island of Cuba, but of course that wall is metphorical. It's the wall that keeps us from being attacked by all those enemies out there who are threatening us.In a fine performance, Robert Duvall, is a Marine Corps fighter pilot who exhibits plenty of what the Greeks called "thumos", a kind of spirited contentiousness, a passionate desire to be recognized as the best at what he does. His problem is that while this works very well when he's in the air -- so we are told -- it doesn't apply easily to his home life, not even with a wife as understanding as Blythe Danner, and a couple of younger kids who find his huffing and puffing masculinity as much amusing as irritating. "Okay, SPORTS FANS, it's oh-four-hundred, muster for inspection!" He has the most trouble with his oldest son, Michael O'Keefe, who is turning eighteen and is a high school senior. That's an age at which you are supposed to be shedding some of the less-than-perfect influences of your childhood. It pits Duvall's "Kill 'em all and let God sort 'em out" attitude against the rules of the game. For instance, when your opposite number on a rival basketball team fouls you, you're supposed to continue playing fair. You're not supposed to follow your Dad's orders and knock down the offender and break his arm in the process, causing your team to lose.That basically is what the movie is about -- the love/hate relationship between O'Keefe and Duvall, mediated by the only truly mature person in the family, Blythe Danner. Duvall's headstrong attitude leads to some ancillary problems. One involves race. (This is South Carolina in the early 1960s.) Another is his problematic status in the Marine Corps. He gets drunk sometimes and he pulls unfunny, childish stunts on others. It's all pretty well laid out for us. The characters we see aren't stereotyped in any way, but recognizable human beings.A major weakness is the casting of Michael O'Keefe in the important role of Duvall's son and heir. He's not much of an actor and when he weeps it's an embarrassment. And personally I wish there had been more scenes involving airplanes because I love them, although I hate them too because they done me wrong once. What I mean, for instance, is -- well, okay, Duvall has been brought to Beaufort (pronounced "Bew-fort") in South Carolina to whip a lax squadron into shape. And we hear his initial speech to the members of his new command, telling them that they will obey his orders as if they came from God almighty. This is already a cliché. We've seen it often before. But it's a GOOD cliché! That's WHY we've seen it so often before. Yet we get only about two minutes of watching Duvall chewing out his aviators from the cockpit of his F-4. More time spent watching Duvall do barrel rolls and a bit less watching O'Keefe dancing and weeping would have helped.I said the roles weren't stereotypes, and they're not, but I also have to say that Pat Conroy's novel explored the original characters in more satisfying detail. Duvall's character has a neat, rather Southern way with words, and Conroy has a keen ear for dialog. Duvall is allowed in the film to say, "A warrior without a war -- and I count myself among that number -- has problems." And, as in the novel, members of the regular black-shoe Navy are called "squids" and "rust pickers." But pruned out of the film is Duvall's drunken expletives at a party in Spain -- Spain, not Mexico -- in which he shouts abuse at the waiter and calls him "a taco eater."The end is a little confusing. It's as if someone had decided that the movie was five minutes too long and took a pair of garden shears to the climax. Why doesn't Duvall eject from his doomed airplane? Because it's over the town of Beaufort. But Beaufort is a very small city, perched on the Atlantic Ocean. It makes no sense. The funeral that follows is handled with far more skill.