By guest reviewer Deke
Richards
PLOT:
Set in 1968 during the Vietnam War, a
group of
U.S.
soldiers are sent to seek out and destroy Viet Cong guerrillas entrenched in
their tunnel network underneath the jungle.
REVIEW: When The Arrow showed me the TUNNEL RATS
trailer, he didn’t tell me who directed it. he asked me what I though; I liked
it! Then he said: “who do you think directed it” with a smile on his
face. I had no clue. When he told me it was UWE BOLL, I was bamboozled – didn’t
see that coming! Having seen many Uwe Boll movies, I must say he’s growing up
with his newest addition TUNNEL RATS. I mean there was no 360 degree “bullet
time” camera shots a la HOUSE OF THE DEAD, no badly choreographed BLOODRAYNE
sword fights and no Ray Liotta in a leather wizard coat like in RETURN OF THE
KING. Absolutely no Boll silliness in this one. Didn’t even felt like he
directed it!
Instead what I got was a grounded
flick as to story and visual approach which followed in the tradition of PLATOON
and SAVING PRIVATE RYAN. It basically took the best of both those movies, in
regards to the battle scenes and did them with a smaller budget. Now where the
film may have lacked in money, it certainly made up in visuals, detail and
settings. With most of the story taking place in a tunnel network, Boll excelled
at conveying the claustrophobia that came with them during in combat. In fact,
the tunnel scenes almost felt like borderline horror sequences in mood and
violence. We get lots of stabbings, a gory impaling, and a rotten corpse all
while these soldiers were “Alone in the Dark” (literally) battling it out
with the Viet Cong!
The acting by all the relative newcomers was solid but
unfortunately, unlike say PLATOON, most of the characters were walking clichés.
You know the deal: The homesick newcomer to the platoon, the jaded soldier who
had seen it all, the slick G.I. who wants to party all the time (Hey, you got to
cut the edge somewhere), the conscientious platoon leader, and of course the
whacked out trooper who is on the verge of breaking up under pressure. One
character that did stand out was the role played by the great Michael Pare, who
did his own version of Tom Berenger in PLATOON. Nothing wrong with that, seeing
that Pare added his usual charismatic style to the part, complemented by his big
pecks (Damn that guy is in shape)!
Although the film ran at a good length without
overdoing its welcome, I had some issues with the pacing of some scenes (like
the overlong beheading of a dead Viet Cong guerrilla). My main qualm with the
film though was that it brought really nothing new to the war genre (its horror
like scenes aside), its story was overly familiar, therefore, although I
enjoyed, it was nothing I hadn’t seen before, a zillion times. In conclusion,
on its own, it was average, been there done that, I appreciated the effort
