Box office
A Few Good Men premiered at the Odeon Cinema, Manchester, England,[26] and opened on December 11, 1992, in 1,925 theaters. It grossed $15,517,468 in its opening weekend and was the top film at the box office for the next three weeks. Overall, it grossed $141,340,178 in the U.S. and $101,900,000 internationally for a total of $243,240,178.[27]
Critical response
On Rotten Tomatoes, A Few Good Men has an approval rating of 84% based on 67 reviews, with an average rating of 7.10/10. The site's critical consensus reads, "An old-fashioned courtroom drama with a contemporary edge, A Few Good Men succeeds on the strength of its stars, with Tom Cruise, Demi Moore, and especially Jack Nicholson delivering powerful performances that more than compensate for the predictable plot."[28] On Metacritic, the film has a score of 62 out of 100, based on 21 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".[29] Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "A+" on an A+ to F scale, one of fewer than 60 films in the history of the service to earn that grade.[30]
Peter Travers of Rolling Stone said, "That the performances are uniformly outstanding is a tribute to Rob Reiner (Misery), who directs with masterly assurance, fusing suspense and character to create a movie that literally vibrates with energy."[31] Richard Schickel in Time called it "an extraordinarily well-made movie, which wastes no words or images in telling a conventional but compelling story."[32] Todd McCarthy in Variety magazine predicted, "The same histrionic fireworks that gripped theater audiences will prove even more compelling to filmgoers due to the star power and dramatic screw-tightening."[33] Roger Ebert was less enthusiastic in the Chicago Sun-Times, giving it two-and-a-half out of four stars and finding its major flaw was revealing the courtroom strategy to the audience before the climactic scene between Cruise and Nicholson. Ebert wrote, "In many ways this is a good film, with the potential to be even better than that. The flaws are mostly at the screenplay level; the film doesn't make us work, doesn't allow us to figure out things for ourselves, is afraid we'll miss things if they're not spelled out."[34]
Widescreenings noted that for Kaffee, "Sorkin interestingly takes the opposite approach of Top Gun", in which Cruise also played the protagonist. In Top Gun, Cruise plays Pete "Maverick" Mitchell, a "hotshot military underachiever who makes mistakes because he is trying to outperform his late father. Where Maverick needs to rein in the discipline, Daniel Kaffee needs to let it go, finally see what he can do." Sorkin and Reiner were praised in gradually unveiling Kaffee's potential in the film.[35]
Military response
The film would later be criticized by the Marine Corps for its unfavorable depiction of Marine culture.[36] The U.S. Department of Defense stated prior to the film's release, in since-declassified documents, that it "did not provide all the support that Castle Rock Pictures asked for in the production of the film". After the military was able to review drafts of the script, the D.O.D. asked for Demi Moore's character to be changed from a Navy officer to a Marine and sought to have Markinson's character not commit suicide.
The Pentagon refused to allow the film to be screened on military bases.[37]
The filmmakers' refusal to comply with all D.O.D. requests is an example of Hollywood pushing back against what is known as the military–entertainment complex.
