Directed by Henry Alex Rubin
Written by Henry Alex Rubin and Sean Mullin
Starring Jai Courtney, Nat Wolff, Finn Wittrock, Arturo Castro and Beau Knapp
MPAA rating: R for pervasive language, some violence and disturbing images

Running time: 1 hour 39 minutes

by Audrey Callerstrom

Henry Alex Rubin’s military/family drama Semper Fi is three films. One film is a drama about a group of friends in the Marine Corp Reserves that live in a small New York town near the Canadian border. Told documentary-style much like “Friday Night Lights,” this portion of the film is the most sincere. The film opens with a scene of the friends bowling, laughing and riffing with the alley staff. Another film is a drama that shows them stationed in Iraq, at one moment filling sandbags, the next dealing with IEDs and gruesome injuries. The last film, the weakest one, involves a standard and rather unjustified prison break plot.