What a beautiful movie!

A waste of 90 minutes of my life

A lot of fun.

It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

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.

Reading the reviews for this movie quickly identified two camps. The first zero in on the infamous director and splinter off into different veins of the same discussion. While the latter group are quick to point out historical, military inaccuracies and/or compare it to other films.I will do neither. Yes, I'm well aware of Uwe Boll and his exploits, even though I had never saw one of his movies until Tunnel Rats, and no, I didn't go into this movie hoping for a great war flick that would stand up to the best of its genre peers. I quite honestly stumbled upon Tunnel Rats by accident and then it was only curiosity as fueled by all the talk about it (both positive and negative) that kept me around and ended with me giving it a go.Tunnel Rats really only has one thing going for it. Claustrophobia. A thing that many people (me included) can easily identify with. The directing isn't bad, the acting isn't particularly bad, but overall, Tunnel Rats is a very average movie. Recommended only as a curiosity and nothing more, I've left the heavy analyzing to others.

I don't count myself among Uwe Boll's apologists. I think it's important I mention that before I start talking about "Tunnel rats". I find all his films utter crap, and the fact that he has found stardom among the geeks as "the world's worst film director" a sort of cosmic joke that only God, should he exist, and Boll himself might find funny.Then there's the occasional hint that he's not stupid. Like the sheer brilliance of one of his latest publicity stunts, boxing his critics, or his systematic criticism of Hollywood directors he finds as bad as he is. And even the latter has its own dose of lame-ness. Here's one director who doesn't claim he could make Hollywood blockbusters better than American directors, but just as badly as them.Anyway, I had some expectations for "Tunnel rats", expectations that I have seen fulfilled, as you may guess from the fact that this thread is on the "Good movies" board. The film is nothing like "Platoon", which I still think it's the best Vietnam movie made so far, but more like "The Siege of Firebase Gloria", "Hamburger Hill" or even "Platoon leader". That is, I expected a movie light on content and budget but competently made and gritty, and that's what I got."Tunnel rats" tells the story of an American unit deployed in the jungles of Vietnam, where they are ordered to explore and take out a vast network of tunnels build by the Vietcong. And that's it. It plays like a cross between "Firebase Gloria" and "Cube", because sooner or later most characters end up underground, fighting for their survival.The best I can say about "Tunnel rats", and the most accurate way to describe it, is to say it doesn't feel like an Uwe Boll movie. The production values are adequate, the music and cinematography are top notch and the acting is competent all around. The latter could have been even better, but the script doesn't exactly shine at character development. It wants all the characters to be underdeveloped, so you don't know who's going to die next, and acts accordingly.Even better, the camera-work is actually pretty good. Boll here finally gets rid of that terrible habit of his of trying to cram to many things into the same movie, and the tone and the approach remain consistent throughout the whole movie. For once, you can see him aiming for subtlety instead of blatant plagiarism and schlock. Yes, I was shocked too. Here Boll restraints the camera as much as he can, aiming (and achieving) a tense calm in the scenes set in the surface, and a harrowing, claustrophobic sensation whenever anybody enters the tunnels.Not all is that good, though. There are a few scenes depicting the V.C. fighters that carefully avoid taking sides, but which feel nevertheless a tad cliché, and a major action scene in the surface abandons the quietness of the previous action bits for a hand-held, rushed camera-work that feels like a major mistake.But still, this is a must see, specially for those who enjoyed the many Nam actioners of the VHS era. Considering how tightly paced it is, and how careful Boll has been this time not to screw this one up, it's unlikely he does anything better anytime soon. What the hell, this film may easily end up passing as his masterpiece.

If you're looking for an intricate plot, look elsewhere. If you're looking for feel-good, shoot-em-up action, look elsewhere. If you're looking for the latest sugar-pill rom-com with Sandra Bullock, why are you even reading this? In Uwe Boll's stunning "Tunnel Rats," the increasingly interesting (but still no less maligned) German director has made what essentially amounts to a chronicle of the madness of war told in a confined, claustrophobic, and frighteningly intimate way. The concept and plot (a platoon of American soldiers uncovering underground tunnels built by the Viet Cong to stage ambushes) are one and the same; and the metaphors paralleling confined spaces to the erosion of sanity are strong--hysteria is very viscerally believable here. While the character introductions and subsequent dialogs may strike notes of familiarity to the seasoned connoisseur of cinematic warfare, it's the unfamiliarity of the cast (with Boll regular Michael Pare being the only 'name' actor present) that makes it all stick; the lack of name actors only heightens the suspense, especially after they've earned our sympathy. To see these young men trapped in confined, booby-trapped spaces (with nothing but a revolver and a flashlight) is the stuff of nightmares, even more so than "The Descent" a few years back. The film maintains a bleak, free-form nihilism throughout, its plot (much like the war it's invoking) a jagged sequence of events rather than a simple matter of connect-the-dots conflict resolution. Tough, hypnotic, and refreshingly free of contrived stylistic symbolism, "Tunnel Rats" could very well be Uwe Boll's masterpiece.7.5 out of 10