AllMovie

The military training drama Tigerland garnered buzz as both a legitimate arthouse effort by critical punching bag Joel Schumacher, and a potential catapult to stardom for Irish stud Colin Farrell. In truth, neither accolade is warranted. Schumacher may shoot with gritty film stock and populate the picture with unknowns, but what little there is of a script is as dull as the mud these trainees trample through. No doubt a striking presence, Farrell can't yet carry a film, and his Irish accent creeps through the Texan one too often to escape notice. Tigerland borrows its setup from Cool Hand Luke, with Farrell in the Paul Newman role of the gregarious rebel who refuses to submit to the regimen of spirit-crushing visited upon the grunts by their seething superiors. Not only is Farrell not charismatic enough to inhabit the role of a mythic personality, but the drill sergeants are also too bland to intimidate. All empty bluster, these blowhards endlessly rehash the tired threats that sounded ominous the first time we heard them in, say, Full Metal Jacket. Everything in this movie is too small and familiar to register. The fact that the soldiers are utterly interchangeable might not be so dire if anything interesting was planned for them, but they never even get to Vietnam, instead spinning their wheels through stock boot camp episodes. Schumacher may not be committing the same overblown sins for which he has been relentlessly pilloried (Batman & Robin, 8MM), but his push in the opposite direction is just as curiously misguided.