Heartbreak Ridge/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Jerk Sue: Gunny Highway, like many other characters Eastwood has played. He is, of course, justified and just doing his job by being tough on his Marines, as is later shown when they're in Grenada. However, he comes across as extremely hypocritical when berates his troops for "not acting like Marines" and, yet, what is he doing? Mouthing off to his superior officer and not showing him any respect. Off duty he's getting drunk, getting into bar fights, and getting arrested. A member of the Armed Forces, especially a senior NCO, should be holding himself to a much higher standard and not be engaging in such disorderly conduct. Then the movie actually portrays Major Powers as a jerk for getting angry at Highway and wanting to punish him when he does these things, and it's then shown as justified because Powers proves to be a poor leader in Grenada. He even calls Powers a prick after one of Highway's Marines accidentally fires at him on the shooting range and punishes him by making run in circles around the platoon as they march back from the range, which is extremely light by real life military standards.
    • In fact, real members of the US military took issue with the film. Originally Highway was a soldier in the US Army, but they refused to provide any type of backing for it, believing it portrayed them as too stereotypical. Even after Highway was changed to a Marine, real Marines also took issue with how they were portrayed.