ONLY THE STRONG SURVIVE

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

All present and accounted for: the elite military unit; the brutal training program; the sadistic topkick; the misfit recruit, seemingly unfit for hazardous duty--especially since the rest of the troops distrust, even despise, him.

Except...Wait a minute...Could I see those orders again? That him, in this instance, is a her--Lieut. Jordan O'Neil, who is played by Demi Moore, muscles aripple, attitude aflare and buzz-cut hairdo a sight. She is, to be strictly honest, traveling under false colors; G.I. Jane should probably be called Swabbie Jane since it is the Navy SEALS that O'Neil is trying so painfully to join. She is also traveling a few years in the future when, the movie's makers imagine, feminist pressure to accord women full military equality, by allowing them to serve even in the riskiest specialties, has become irresistible. Irresistible, that is, when that pressure is applied to the Pentagon by wily Lillian DeHaven, a U.S. Senator whose scheming soul Anne Bancroft inhabits with rip-snorting relish. The brass, of course, expect O'Neil to fail and prove their patronizing assumptions about gals in combat. There even comes a moment when the Senator, faced with base closings in her state, is willing to trade principles for political survival.

This Washington cross fire does not greatly faze O'Neil or interest us. This is not merely because we know that flunking her out of the program would be an intolerable act of political incorrectness. Or because we have by this time acquired such a powerful rooting interest in her securing the right to equal-opportunity maltreatment. It is because the movies have taught us over the years that those who gut out pain for lengthy periods of time are always rewarded, in the end, with inspiring triumphs over their tormentors.

And you have rarely seen, in a picture intended for mainstream audiences, the kind of sustained suffering Moore's character endures here. But the director, Ridley Scott, a great imagist, imparts a bleak, often astonishing beauty to the brutal, frantic (and generally drenched) scramble of training exercises. And he does not eroticize the movie's violence, handling the kinky, if unspoken, attraction that develops between O'Neil and Viggo Mortensen's master chief, the man in charge of clubbing the baby SEALs into fighting trim, with sardonic objectivity. We know where Scott's sympathies lie--he did, after all, make those terrific tributes to female capability, Alien and Thelma & Louise--but he wears them lightly. What he does superbly is establish a raw, compelling reality that transcends his movie's banal premises and predictable conclusion. That permits Moore to play, and us to feel, authentic pain, isolation and courage--shocking stuff to find in an action movie these days.

--By Richard Schickel