DVD & BluRay

AMBUSH Signature, cert 15; DVD £7.99 & on Digital

After the beating of wellequipped US forces by the rag-tag army of the Viet Cong in Vietnam, there was expert opinion that the West would never again fight a disastrous ground war on unfamiliar enemy soil .

Nobody saw Iraq and Afghanistan coming. However, the conflict has produced some great war movies that have tried to salvage some American dignity with difficulty from what was a military disaster. I’m talking about Full Metal Jacket, The Deer Hunter, Platoon Apocalypse Now and a worthy mention for Mel Gibson’s (yes, I know) We Were Soldiers, for example.

Now comes Ambush, which doesn’t rise to the same status, and didn’t have a blockbuster budget, but does capture the sweaty, sticky, oppressive atmosphere of jungle warfare. The ingenuity of their enemy often caught the GIs unprepared when the Viet Cong seemingly popped up from nowhere to launch devastating hitand-run attacks. The answer was a network of tunnels beneath the jungle floor. Here a plan to retrieve classified documents snatched in such a Viet Cong raid is put in action by General Drummond Aaron Eckhart (pictured). Commanded from topside by Captain Mora (Gregory Sims), a Green Beret special forces veteran, inexperienced Cpl Ackerman (Connor Paolo) leads a team of fresh-faced and nervous engineers into the tunnels to map the network. This leads to a deadly ambush in the dark and cramped labyrinth of passageways and the US team are in a life or death fight. It shows the callousness of military thinking that the guys sent underground are largely expendable. It’s no classic, but has action and suspense. Our rating:

(out of 10)