It is certainly interesting to write a review about a film that took place where I actually resided for two months. In September of 1971 when this film is set, your's truly was doing his basic training at Fort Polk, Louisiana. I did get to the North Fort at one point in my training where the infamous Tigerland was located. In fact Tigerland was a nickname given to the whole northern part of the army base.

I was doing the basic training to be a weekend warrior and avoid Vietnam. But I saw so many of the kids who were just like the ones portrayed in the film it was actually a rather nerve wrecking old home week. In 1971 everyone except the policy makers in Washington knew that this was going to end when as Senator George Aiken declared, we said we won and then went home. And of course the South Vietnamese government we were protecting would fold like a napkin.

By that time the army was scraping the bottom for soldier material and you can see it in the company of men that are in Tigerland. This is where more soldiers shipped for Vietnam than any other place in the nation. The Louisiana swamps best approximated the climate conditions of Vietnam.

This particular company has a real odd ball in it with Colin Farrell. He's doing his best to get out of the army, but the army just won't oblige him. So he's waging his own war against them by becoming a 'barracks lawyer' and getting others out. And he's driving the officers and NCOs quite nuts doing it.

I would rate Tigerland a lot higher because there is much I liked about the film. It was not shot at Fort Polk, but in places that gave you feel of the place. What I remember best about it was rain and mud. In that summer of 1971 it rained nearly every single day I was there. But the rain and sometimes it would come a few times a day. Would be a sudden downpour, maybe at most 20 minutes then it would cool off and then resume being muggy. And the ground couldn't absorb it fast enough so it was always muddy. You did your best work in that brief period after rain stopped it was then actually decent enough for normal activities.

What I couldn't quite grasp was Colin Farrell's motivations for what he was doing. I blame that on the writer and also the director.

As for the other players the best in the cast was Thomas Guiry playing this poor sad sack kid from the Louisiana bayous. I met a few just like him, he stopped his formal education at the 6th grade. It was a touching performance on Guiry's part.

So here's to Fort Polk, not a place I recommend, but sometimes a place which is needed to train our soldiers. It got a good film, but not a great one in its honor.

It's 1971. The war in Vietnam no longer has popular support. A group of new recruits is starting 8 weeks of training at Fort Polk, Louisiana before heading off to the war. Bozz (Colin Farrell) is a trouble maker. There are destructive relationships in the group that culminates in a deadly encounter.

Joel Schumacher has strip down the production. The strength is the chaotic energy coming from the relative unknowns in this movie. The most impressive is the young unknown lead Colin Farrell. He oozes charisma. Another is the much picked on Clifton Collins Jr. The story is a jumble of other military training movies. The best thing Schumacher does is point the camera at these great young faces.

The strange thing about this film is that it's a movie about the Vietnam War without ever coming close to Vietnam. The environment at the Tigerland locale best approximated those of the depressingly tropical and swampy conditions of the war torn country of South Vietnam. Via the perspective of the military instructors, it's virtually a given that not only will everyone that goes through Tigerland ship off to the other side of the world, but that they probably wouldn't be coming back. If you go by the statistics of the war, that seems a bit unfair, as the fifty eight thousand soldiers who died in the conflict represented a little over two percent of the two million, seven hundred and ten thousand who served there. The stats were much worse for wounded and injured however, ratcheting up the casualty rate to about one in ten.

While attempting to demonstrate a single soldier's resolve to be as anti-authoritarian as possible, the story definitely serves as an anti-war film. Whether the brutality expressed and condoned by the superior officers was authentic or not, I would have to leave to the judgment of those who served at Fort Polk. Private Roland Bozz's one man mission to muster out as many of his fellow soldiers as possible appears to be his only recourse since his superior officers are dead set against filing a disciplinary charge that would result in a discharge, honorable or otherwise. With an unreadable personality and complete disregard for authority, Bozz cultivates friends and enemies within his platoon, which ultimately erupts into an all out personal war between himself and Private Wilson (Shea Whigham).

It's probably not too much of a stretch to consider that recruits like Private Miter (Clifton Collins Jr.) were all too common in the Army during this period. With little education and a conflicted home life, there was very little opportunity for someone with his kind of background to make a go of it in normal society. The film does a good job of bringing these dynamics to the fore, while demonstrating that war can be hell, even if you were half a world away from it.