Tunnel Rats

Favouring brawn over brains, sensation over subtext, war films are mostly crass, loud and plotless - much like the real thing. Stock characters and shock tactics proliferate; shades of grey are surplus to requirement. How else would Oliver Stone and Sam Peckinpah have made greater contributions to the cannon than Stanley Kubrick?

Enter Uwe Boll, an opportunistic ex-videogame adaptor for whom crass, loud and plotless has become something of a stock-in-trade. Although it's an apt format through which to legitimise his directorial excesses, you can't help wishing an idea that amounts to 'Platoon Underground' was in slightly surer hands. This is, after all, the man whose Postal poked fun at both 9/11 and midget rape.

Sure enough, we start in extremely shoddy territory, as a batch of 2D F.N.G.s (see Forrest Gump) are introduced to the indignities of 'Nam life. God-fearing sarge Michael Paré - rapidly becoming the downmarket De Niro to Boll's skidmark Scorsese - is so hard he punches out potential mutineers and calls an air strike on his own camp. Meanwhile, Bible-belters spout scripture, black men cuss and whistle through their teeth, and one not-long-for-the-planet newbie rhapsodises about his sick mom's home cookin'; surely the soundbite equivalent of signing your own death warrant.

This kind of down-home, hand-wringing shtick was tired when trotted out for five-time Oscar-winner Saving Private Ryan, so no-time Oscar nominee Uwe Boll is really pushing his luck. That is, until the film moves underground and its quality heads, unexpectedly, through the roof. Cinema has a special affinity for claustrophobia, particularly when a VC soldier might ram some bamboo through your jugular at any moment. Booby-trapped with spikes, grenades and drowning pools, the titular tunnels are dangerous enough to make Indiana Jones soil his strides, and as petrified grunts hack each other to pieces in these smoky, rat-infested holes, it feels like you're watching an X-rated 'A-Team' episode; the one they really didn't want you to see.

Add in Matthias Neumann's cinematography, which cloaks proceedings in a charcoal-hued sadness, a downbeat, oddly moving conclusion and the fact that no one says anything stratospherically moronic for the last hour and you'd wager that Boll had successfully renounced his pathological rubbishness.

Nope. According to online gossip, he's merely come full circle; from making unspeakable films out of decent videogames to making videogames out of passable pictures like this - an act so mercenary the Tunnel Rats themselves would blush.