Why ‘G.I. Jane’ deserves to be more than a bad Oscars joke

On Oscars night, “G.I. Jane” was the punchline of a throwaway joke that instigated the slap heard ’round the world.

Before that, the movie, which came out 25 years ago this week, was also a forgettable joke, at least to critics. Mostly, it was just plain forgotten.

But its caricatured reputation, embodied by Demi Moore’s shaved head, belies a more nuanced truth: The film is actually pretty great.

Ridley Scott’s 1997 action thriller starred Moore as a (fictional) woman recruited to be the first female Navy SEAL. As Moore tells it, this was the role she worked the hardest for.

“I think very few people who aren’t athletes or members of the military themselves can truly grasp what I went through to transform myself to star in ‘G.I. Jane,’ ” she writes in her 2019 memoir “Inside Out.” “It is the film I am most proud of, because it was the hardest for me to make — emotionally, physically and mentally.”

The star was facing an uphill battle from the start, and not just in the boot camp she and her “G.I. Jane” co-stars had to go through.

Moore’s last major movie, 1996’s “Striptease,” had been savaged in reviews, and the star’s status as one of the highest-earning actresses in Hollywood brought a wave of backlash: “Yet another case of the star’s salary being much more interesting, and exuberantly vulgar, than anything the screen reveals,” complained one critic.

It then made sense that a movie like “G.I. Jane” would appeal to Moore, who leaned all the way into her role as a female soldier who’s put through training hell and then a simulated torture scenario, engineered by her captain (Viggo Mortensen). She never gives in and — in one of the film’s more iconic, if eye-rolling moments — wins Mortensen’s character’s respect by kicking him in the groin while spitting out blood and yelling “Suck my d – – k!”

The critics responded in kind. Contrary to its reputation as a high-budget bomb — to make matters worse, war veterans weighed in negatively as well, disparaging the film’s inaccuracies — the movie did receive some acclaim. Variety and Rolling Stone offered praise; Roger Ebert commended the action and the actor.

“The training sequences are as they have to be: incredible rigors, survived by O’Neil,” Ebert wrote at the time. “They are good cinema because Ridley Scott, the director, brings a documentary attention to them, and because Demi Moore, having bitten off a great deal here, proves she can chew it. Moore is serious, focused and effective.”

“It was gratifying to see that someone as smart as Ebert got it,” Moore writes in her memoir, while admitting the majority of reviews were not nearly as generous. “It felt like kind of a collective decision just to trash me and treat me as the joke I’d always feared I was,” she writes.

Moore said that she always believed the film fell a victim of sexist double standards.

“The one-two punch of me being paid more than any woman to date — and equal to many men in my industry — and then playing a woman who was just as strong as a man was too much for a lot of people,” she wrote.

Since the very public Will Smith v. Chris Rock dustup, both of the “G.I. Jane” writers have weighed in to protest the film being used as an insult.

Story creator Danielle Alexandra posted a message on LinkedIn.

“To Will Smith and Jada. As the writer and creator of G.I. Jane, I would be so proud to have Jada as G.I. Jane in any sequel,” Alexandra wrote. “Jane reflects female empowerment, personal strength, guts, determination and heroism, and I cannot think of anyone who better exemplifies that than Jada.”

Screenwriter David Twohy pointed out that the message behind Moore’s shaved head still stands.

“I do hear from women in combat settings who say, ‘That movie is why I’m here,’ ” Twohy wrote. “I’m sure that a lot of women in the military go through the same things that we portrayed. I don’t think misogyny has gone away in the military.”

“I think it has a powerful message that still resonates today,” he said.