Tunnel Rats

Introduction

After reviewing the abysmal Seed, I approached Tunnel Rats with extreme trepidation. There is no doubt that Uwe Boll is a terrible director, but what he lacks in talent he makes up for in ambition. Although his reputation is founded on videogame adaptations (House of The Dead, Alone in the Dark, Bloodrayne), he made the aforementioned serial killer horror, and an upcoming project, Stoic, both written for the screen.

Another of his non-videogame films is Tunnel Rats (or 1968 Tunnel Rats though bizarrely the Metrodome synopsis says it's set in 1967!), a Vietnam War film which follows a group of new recruits in a special team trained to bring down the Viet Cong's tunnel network.

One of the main strengths of the Viet Cong was their knowledge of the land and ability to appear, kill and then vanish without trace. Key to this was their vast network of tunnels which allowed men and weapons to move unseen around the country and reasonably safe from aerial bombardment. Boll claims this was the main reason the Americans lost the war and Dan Clarke, who wrote the story, says he did a lot of research into the tunnels, how the Vietnamese lived in them and how the US tried to combat them.

In Tunnel Rats the group find a tunnel entrance and use their limited training against the Viet Cong's expertise, guile and experience to try and find the underground headquarters. This leads to subterranean confrontations with the enemy and the traps they left.

Video

A very good picture with some lovely external shots of helicopters snaking through mountain terrain above a river, though the tunnel scenes are less convincing as they are obviously fake and don't have the sort of tension that Neil Marshall achieved in The Descent.

There are some brutal and bloody death scenes, especially one where a soldier has a bamboo cane ran through his neck and these are done pretty well.

Audio

You have the choice of Dolby Digital 5.1 or 2.0 Stereo and the 5.1 is obviously the best for a film where the sounds are crucial and there are battle sequences with gunfire and explosions. The latter has bullets flying all around the room and has an impressive amount of bass. The tunnel scenes are less notable, with the sound design failing to involve you in the soldiers' plight and I felt some of these were a little dull.

Jessica de Rooij's score is horrible, sharing Boll's lack of nuance and subtlety, banging you over the head when a gentle prod would have sufficed. There is no attempt at a quiet musical motif for a poignant moment, you get the full works out of at least three speakers!

Extra Features

The main menu is preceded by skippable trailers for Assembly, The Counterfeiters, and Overlord.

First up is an interview with writer/director/producer Uwe Boll who answers a series of questions (posted as text on a black background) and his responses have been cut down. He talks about the project and his career in general in a lively fashion, surrounded by Postal merchandise.

The Behind the Scenes is short and moderately interesting, showing, as I suspected, that Boll again shot without a script and the construction of the tunnels in a South African studio.

There are a series of outtakes which are without context or comment and are neither bloopers nor deleted scenes.

There is also a trailer.

Conclusion

I went into this with rock bottom expectations so my opinion may be slightly skewed as I anticipated a toe curlingly bad film - the sort of thing of which Ed Wood would have been ashamed and would reinforce Uwe Boll's reputation as probably the World's most inept filmmaker - it's not terrible, not good, nearly mediocre.

Tunnel Rats is riddled with war clichés, especially those from the Vietnam War: a Jewish soldier tells people about how he misses his moms brisket, another says about how he's going to set up a fast food joint when he gets home and the grizzled lieutenant who orders a Viet Cong sniper to be hanged from a tree (because he wasn't wearing a uniform so doesn't have to be treated as a POW). This character seems to be based on Tom Berenger's Sergeant Barnes from Platoon (there's even a Sgt. Grodin type character for him to have a run in with). The rest are pretty disposable and you never engage with a single one, not caring if they live or die.

Uwe Boll the film is based on real events but with fictional characters but one episode, with a soldier on his own for a long period of time, killing someone and hacking off a couple of limbs to make room before drowning in a water trap invalidates this claim as there is no way anyone could know what happened down there. The most Boll could claim is that a tunnel was discovered at Củ Chi and that men from this platoon tackled the Viet Cong living within. There is no attempt to contextualise the efforts of the 'tunnel rats' in the wider significance of the Tết Offensive, sticking to the men's battle with the VC fighters but this doesn't lead to a taut, tense thriller. Boll allows the focus to wander so you are never stuck underground for any length of time, experiencing what the 'tunnel rat' does.

This is by no means a terrible film, just a bad one with poor acting, direction, no script and the improvisation doesn't work as it should. Boll also shows his preoccupation with gratuitous violence - it's not enough to hang someone, he has to show that the spine has snapped and is protruding from the body.

There are plenty of Vietnam War films around - the cover says "After Apocalypse Now, After Platoon Comes... Tunnel Rats" so Boll aimed high but has missed by a great margin. There are plenty of better movies set during that conflict, watch one of those instead and avoid this rather dull and unsatisfying effort.