Blekkhart This is one of Bolls best movies. "That doesn't say a lot" thinks the haters. Yes, actually it does say a lot because Boll has made excellent movies like Seed, Stoic, Postal, Far Cry, Rampage, Max Schmeling, Darfur and Assault on Wall Street. Boll is one of our times most unappreciated and underrated directors. Just because he made movies like Bloodrayne and In the name of the king, people can't look past it and enjoy his other movies..like Tunnel Rats. Tunnel Rats is a far cry (pun intended) from a movie like Bloodrayne. Yet, I'm guessing a lot of people will give it a 1-rating just because it's Boll (probably without even having watched it). I can't believe the low imdb-rating...4,6 as I'm writing. So I give it 10, just to even it up a little.I would definitely give this movie a hight rating...at least 7/10. I think this is a great movie. It offers a completely different movie experience than Bolls earlier video game adaptations. The movie is set during the Vietnam war, and follows the fate of a group of soldiers who are sent out to hunt and kill underground Viet Cong. But you should not go into this movie expecting a documentary style war movie. The movie is set during the Vietnam war, but don't expect every detail to be accurate. This is not that kind of movie. It can be viewed as a general war movie, depicting the futileness and dreariness of any war. Or it can also be watched as a horror movie, or as a "journey into darkness" type of drama movie, simply set in the context of the Vietnam war.This movie is all about atmosphere...about ambiance. Except for the first 20 min or so there is hardly any dialog...only a dreadful atmosphere. The cinematography is excellent, the musical score is dark and beautiful and sets the mood perfectly. This movie offers a dark and claustrophobic movie experience. Take a dash of Platoon, Thin red line, Cannibal Holocaust, John Rambo, Beneath Hill 60, Predator and you have some idea what to expect. Well written, well directed, well acted and well shot...this is another Boll gem to put on the top shelf of your movie collection.

relars1 A movie about American soldiers in the Vietnam conflict. Besieged by enemy soldiers conducting hit-and-run sorties against the Americans, the G.I.'s make the decision to go down into the tunnels, after their enemies.What follows, is a gritty, grim and gruesome depiction of individual combat scenes in terribly small underground tunnels. American soldiers must ignore the personal danger, and enter into this cramped, nightmare world loaded with booby-traps, Punji stakes, water traps and the fanatical resistance of North Vietnamese and Vietcong soldiers and irregulars.Generally armed only with .45 pistols and flashlights, the Americans must find and kill their enemies at arms' length range, then find a way to get around the dead bodies in the tunnels.The directors of this movie deliberately emphasized the smallness of the tunnels - the claustrophobic surroundings are pushed into the viewers' faces relentlessly, and virtually take over the entire story. As each individual soldier belly-crawls through the tunnels, the personal nature of this battle, and the seeming hopelessness of any chance of surviving this experience - is designed to give the viewer bad dreams.Story? Not much of one. Character development? None. Plot twists/unexpected developments? Nope. Instead of actually being a movie, this devolves into a carnival of slaughter. Unless you just like grimness and hopeless situations, you're not going to get much out of this movie. While the face-to-face encounters in the tunnels seem to be fairly accurate depictions, the rest of the battle scenes and any special effects are quite cheesy. Repeated viewings, either for entertainment's sake, or to look for things not seen in the first viewing? - you'd have to have something wrong with you.

fivekc Make no bones about it, this film is TERRIBLE. Everything about the making and production of this film has been shockingly misjudged.For the first 30 minutes of this Boll tries to make you fell empathy for the character's bleak situation for what lies ahead, but instead it just irritates you as the characters are all paper-thin and the dialogue is terrible. As the film progresses it becomes more and more silly, and is riddled with historical and tactical inaccuracies, which really make you think he should have read a bit more into the background of the actual tunnel rat units in Vietnam. At some point it almost borders on insult towards Americans in its ridiculous and unsentimental portrayal of its fighting men.If like me, you watched this film hoping for insight into this fascinating aspect of fighting in the Vietnam war, I suggest instead you read Mangold & Penycate's Tunnels of CuChi, its what Boll should have done.

MisterWhiplash Uwe Boll, what's with you making good movies all of a sudden? Perhaps Postal got him out of the stupor of churning out celluloid crap-shoots and now, more or less in his career, he's actually trying. This doesn't mean he's always a filmmaker that people should rush out to see. There's a reason, for example, that he won't have a movie play in theaters again the way he had with his video-game bullshit in the mainstream. But under the radar, he's able to do a little more than before, with a little ambition going a ways in a B-movie set up. Tunnel Rats is such a B-movie that there aren't any really recognizable actors (not even the somewhat recognizable star of Rampage). In that sense it reminds one of those old-school war movies of the 50's and 60's (Merill's Marauder's anyone) where the lack of recognizable faces lends further authenticity to the situations.There isn't really a firm plot for the film, but this is not too much of a problem. What's basic to lay out is that there are a lot of intricate tunnels under the surface in Vietnam, and they've been dug by the Vietcong as their own kind of maze. We get to know the characters, more or less, though to keep track of names might be fruitless; we know these people more by type or by personality (one very pleasant touch is that one of the real walking clichés in war movies- the guy who prattles on and just can't wait to get home to his mama or wife or whatever- not only doesn't get slaughtered the first chance it should happen, but he becomes a momentary bad-ass in hand-to-hand combat right in the s*** of things.The lack of characterization could be a much bigger flaw to contend with if it were a firm character piece. But aside from some early getting- to-know-you chit-chat (and one other cliché, describing what it was like back home, is a little more intolerable), when the troops start to move out and go into the tunnels, it becomes a non-stop action film. And as part of Boll's ambition to twist the much done Vietnam-War film - a particular kind of war film sub-genre in some respects - most of the runtime is spent underground as the Americans and the Vietcong square off, in the dark, sometimes not knowing who is going to come upon the other. For two points of reference, think of the opening sequence of Casualties of War, only extended to the claustrophobic, horror film extremes of The Descent (albeit Boll is not as strong or inventive a filmmaker as De Palma or Marshall, save for the touches of claustrophobia and the ultra-grisly violence). Boll doesn't turn away from the more gruesome bits, and we shouldn't either. We're in combat that is massive, all over the place, super- bloody, and it works to ratchet up the tension. We are also given a little of the "other" side, which is just as primitive in their reaction to the US and the US is to them (the "three of them raped a woman, I must kill them all" line is all we get for rationale, whatever). But in an odd way a woman with two kids ends up getting some complexity, if only towards the end during a very intense scene where she's confronted by another US soldier during a bombing raid. Boll could bleed (no pun intended) this over into melodrama, but doesn't too much. If he's guilty of things it's lack of characterization and a very strong story, which should be big cinematic crimes. However, he also has a fantastic sense of pacing action, knows well where to put the camera, and gives some of the soldiers a chance to shine on screen. When it keeps its focus narrow and strong, it's something of a triumph... and then one has to remember it's Uwe Boll. Once again, who knew?