REVIEWED - GUY X: SCOTTISH director Saul Metzstein follows his debut feature, Late Night Shopping, an engaging picture of young Glasgow night workers, with this cynical black comedy of army life.
Guy X opens in the summer of 1979, when rookie soldier Rudy Spruance (Jason Biggs) has been posted to Hawaii and due to a clerical error, is dropped off at a US military base in Greenland instead. The soldiers are bored out of their minds, passing the days with mostly pointless tasks and their nights with repeated screenings of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. In one scene they all dance outdoors to Edwin Starr's pacifist hit War, and in another a soldier tells of his dream in which a leprechaun is not Irish but French.
Everyone on the base has an unusual surname. The colonel, Lane Woolwrap (Jeremy Northam), is a remote Vietnam veteran who's sexually involved with his assistant, Sgt Teale (Nastacha McElhone). Other soldiers are named Lavone, Brank and Genteen, and then there's a guy known only as X.
The movie's premise is intriguing and its progress quite unpredictable, but its sinister revelation is so well flagged that dramatic tension is dissipated. As a satire on the absurdities of army life, it's amusing but lacks the cutting edge of M*A*S*H*, Catch-22 and Three Kings.
Unusually, the US soldiers who populate the picture are played by British, Canadian or Icelandic actors, with the exception of Biggs, who demonstrates an impressive maturity untapped in his three American Pie movies.
