capsule : irredeemably stupid and pigheaded attempt at a story about the first female navy seal . read rogue warrior instead . demi moore has never been terribly compelling , if you ask me , but she's the best thing in g . i . jane , a dismal and off-kilter piece of work from the once-notable director ridley scott . what's to be said about a movie where the best scene is the one where she shaves her own head ? the biggest problems with g . i . jane are a ) plausibility and b ) deployment . the broad outlines of the story are compelling -- the very concept of women in the military has always caused a stir in many quarters -- but the movie hasn't got the faintest idea how to put across its conceits . plus , it suffers from a grafted-on hollywood plot that one can hear squeaking and grinding blocks away . moore plays o'neil , a career military woman with enough endurance for any three soldiers . she gets involved in a pilot program to allow women in the seal training program , which is being coordinated by a brassy female senator ( anne bancroft , utterly wasted ) . a good example of the movie's basic airheadedness -- or maybe indecisiveness -- is an early scene with moore's beau , also a military man . " i wasn't ready to decide the rest of my life today , " he bleats at her while scrubbing her toes in the bathroom . the whole speech was glaringly upstaged by the fact that for a military office , o'neil -- sorry , demi -- has amazingly good-looking feet . o'neil's trouble begins before she even enters seal training proper . a whole bevy of preferential treatments have been set up to provide women with a slightly easier road into the military , and apparently all of those protocols have been preserved in the seal program as well . this gets o'neil hopping mad , since that's the last thing she wants . there are several tongue-tied speeches about whether or not her very presence there " makes a statement " , but the movie simply doesn't have the capacity to make us care ; it's too busy hustling us through one manufactured conflict after another . the details of the seal training are ridiculous and overblown . in richard marcienko's eye-opening book rogue warrior , there are a great many details about the brutality of the program ( 60 percent of the enlistees don't make it ) . in g . i . jane , we're treated to the unbelievable sight of the drill seargeants using live ammo on the recruits in one exercise . in another scene , the recruits have to eat their meals out of trash cans . physical abuse is commonplace ( another total boner ) . even the hill didn't go this far . as the movie plodded onwards , i kept asking myself : isn't there some basis in fact for a better , more compelling story about this subject ? a story that wasn't beholden to hollywood conventions about the military , for one ? the movie also shoots itself in the foot by injecting gratuitous pop-song snatches onto the soundtrack ( " mama told me not to come " is used to disastrous effect at one point ) , which only makes the movie seem that much more contrived and manipulative . demi is , interestingly enough , fine in the picture . there was never a moment when i doubted her competence or her physical presence . it was the rest of the movie i had my reservations about . big ones . 
