Tiger Raid

Bri­an Glee­son and Damien Molony take to the dusty plains of Iraq as blood­thirsty mer­ce­nar­ies on a human safari. Their loy­al­ties are test­ed as secrets begin to sur­face: the twist­ed craft­man­ship of their invis­i­ble but ever-present supe­ri­or, ​“Dave”. Tiger Raid, filmed most­ly in real-time, serves gore, clev­er­ly admin­is­tered com­e­dy and blink-and-you’ll-miss-it romance, all at the expense of a pre­dictable plot.

The cin­e­matog­ra­phy self-con­tra­dicts, cut­ting from panora­mas of emp­ty flat­lands to super close-up, white noise accom­pa­nied shots of the men. This hokey cokey of visu­al con­trasts is delib­er­ate, mir­ror­ing the errat­ic minds of the film’s cen­tral rogues. Red-hued flash­backs of for­mer lovers and point of view shots of vic­tims expose Joe and Pad­dy from every ugly angle. This inner tur­moil is over­shad­owed only by the grue­some chaos they wield when con­front­ed with human obsta­cles. Mus­cu­lar mas­culin­i­ty is val­ued above civil­i­ty in this apa­thet­ic universe.

For his debut as both screen­writer and direc­tor, Simon Dixon deliv­ers a cold-blood­ed killing spree with a frag­ile core. This is an hon­est look at the bar­barism of guer­ril­la war­fare and the psy­cho­log­i­cal con­se­quences await­ing its per­pe­tra­tors. Joe, played by Glee­son, hearti­ly per­forms a rough-and-ready charm act too insin­cere to take seri­ous­ly. He is dehu­man­ised by the sav­agery of his actions, obses­sive­ly depen­dent on oth­ers and a mani­ac in all sens­es. If the direc­tor intend­ed to make Joe the cel­e­brat­ed mar­tyr of this movie, he is unsuccessful.

The dark, comedic quirks of this film (imag­ine a pant­i­ng Glee­son dis­mem­ber­ing bod­ies in a self-made pon­cho) are its unques­tion­able high­lights. Dis­ap­point­ing­ly, Dixon deflates the dra­ma by deliv­er­ing a genre-con­fused, cliché infest­ed con­clu­sion that offers redemp­tion to its agree­ably unde­serv­ing anti­heroes. Its rushed, open-end­ed style is offen­sive to a plot that oth­er­wise so patient­ly treads out ten­sion. If this movie exist­ed with­out an ener­getic, mas­ter-manip­u­la­tor take by Bri­an Glee­son, it would be a frac­tion of the fun. Set in a waste­land that blooms in blood­shed, its god­less inhab­i­tants pre­pare for perdi­tion from the get-go. Tiger Raid should come with a trig­ger warn­ing: this is the very worst ver­sion of our world.