Tigerland film review

certificate_18

TIGERLAND

Joel Schumacher is a director whose body of work seems full of contradictions. On the one hand he has made some of the biggest crimes against cinema over the last ten years (8mm, two terrible Batman films and a couple of weary Grisham adaptations). But on the other hand he is also the director who gave us Falling Down, one of the best zeitgeist movies of the 90s, as well as the entertaining if not influential St. Elmo's Fire and The Lost Boys back in the 80s. Pretty much a big budget director, his films have always reeked of money, either the cash spent on them or the millions they have earned at the box office. His new film Tigerland is a stark about-turn therefore, a lowbudget, no-star, documentary style refelction on life as a US troop awaiting deployment in Vietnam in the early 70s. While it's by no means a terrible film, it isn't a great one either, and ultimately is a somewhat disappointing and unnecessary addition to the cinematic Vietnam canon.

Eschewing set-pieces and spectacle, Schumacher gets his hands dirty here, with the movie mostly shot in a hand-held style. It tells the story of a bunch of recruits to the US army, mostly drafted in against their will, and concerns itself with the six weeks they spend in intensive training before being shipped out to kill the VietCong. If anything the message of this film is simplistic: war is hell, certainly, but preparation for war can be equally infernal. And, to push the envelope of this metaphor, if hell is other people then war is where these people get right up your nose. Concentrating so much on the training aspect of soldierly life, it's hard not to think of the first half of Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket when watching Tigerland, but the comparisons only exist as far as content is concerned: the new film lacks any of the impact or great characters that filled the great master's penultimate film.