Could this movie make up its mind, please!

Rating: 5/10 (30 June 2001)

"Tigerland" is a mixed bag.
As for being most definetly a career move, it´s a very clever one. Right after the intriguingly flawed "Falling Down" (1993) Mr. Schumacher was trying to kill his reputation by playing the hired-gun-director in a both megalomaniac and boring string of alternating John-Grisham- and Batman-movies. Somebody must have told him or maybe he sensed it himself, for "Flawless" (1999) and even "8 MM" (1998)tried to be real, stand-alone-movies and not part of a merchandising campaign. "Tigerland" looks like an even more radical departure from mainstream-big-bucks-movie-making. No stars, hand held camera, bleached out colors, blurred images: any- and everything in here - while Mr. Schumacher starts increasingly resembling a real director, an artist who cares about his art again - is shouting: ART! IMPORTANT! MESSAGE!
But that´s exactly the point where the problems start to overshadow the movie´s clever performance. Not for a single moment does "Tigerland" know weather it wants to be an anti-Vietnam movie in particular or an anti-war movie in general or a study on the effects of harsh, often even inhuman military training on young, unsuspecting males or a melodramatic comedy or a buddy movie or a too-clever-for-its-own-good-remake of Walter Hill´s masterpiece "Southern Comfort" (1981). If you don´t believe me check out the young leading man´s motivations and actions. He is introduced as a troublemaker who just can´t help causing trouble because the army and he match like heaven and hell. Keeping up some pretense of staying in character the film makers show him arranging to go A.W.O.L while constantly fighting his somehow dim witted and brutish superiors. But they´re not that brutal and dim witted as not to notice that our anti-war-hero is the best soldier in the whole rookie-platoon and a born leader too. Consequently he doesn´t leave camp but acknowledges his responsibilities. The longer the movie is running the more does it back my suspicion that for box-office-reasons Mr. Schumacher secretly wants his audience to root for "Tigerland"´s hero because of his warrior´s abilities and not because of his contrasting, alas half-hearted tries to desert the army. Needless to say that this attitude undermines any of the film´s pretenses to be more than the average war-is-hell-but-someone-has-to-do-the-job-flick.
Don´t let "Tigerland´s" visual design fool you. And in case you want to see a really good movie about the effects of war an young men, give John Irvin´s much underrated, and unjustly so, "Hamburger Hill" (1987) a second chance.