Taps Review

MPAA Rating: PG
Released: 1981

Taps was an early 80's film about a group of military students that take a stand and fight against a planned proposal to bulldoze down the Bunker Hill Military Academy and replace it with some condominiums. But when they fortify their academy from the outside world, they soon learn that the inevitable pending confrontation with police and the National Guard can lead to tragic results.

General Harlan Bache (George C. Scott) is in charge of the Bunker Hill Military Academy, an elite establishment that has trained children for over a hundred years. In this school the A-B-C's and 1-2-3's take a back seat to military training and long discussions about the honor of soldiers and war.

Brian Moreland (Timothy Hutton) is chosen as Bache's right hand man – he's a senior student that will be moving on to West Point Academy in the coming year. Moreland is a naïve youth that absolutely idolizes Bache and his teachings, so much so that Bache can say or do no wrong.

One day news spreads across the ranks that the Bunker Hill Military Academy is scheduled to be shut down. The head brass have decided that rigid military academies are no longer relevant in modern society, so to cut expenditures they agreed to sell the property to some investors. Within one year the academy Moreland and countless other students have come to know as home will be bulldozed down so that condominiums can be built.

Bache vows to fight this decision, and shortly thereafter a tragic accident sends him away from the academy. With no adults to supervise things, Moreland gathers together his friends, Alex Dwyer (Sean Penn) and David Shawn (Tom Cruise), and fellow students and together they decide to close off the academy to the outside world. They will prevent anyone from entering the premises under threat of armed force until the military brass agrees to allow the academy to remain open.

Although all students are on the same page initially, when police and military personnel surround the compound, some students, many of which haven't even reached puberty yet, start to have second thoughts about their situation. Indeed this sentiment is even held by Alex Dwyer, who remains not out of belief in their course of actions but rather out of friendship to Moreland.

On the other hand David Shawn is all too glad to remain entrenched within the academy. He clings to false perceptions about the glory of battle and is antsy to spark a violent exchange. But Shawn and the other students soon learn that the fantasies of battle are far different from the realities.

Taps is a drama first and foremost; although there are some action scenes, the film focuses on the storyline and the characters involved. While I normally am not one to complain about a detailed and well laid out storyline, at times Taps is a little too deliberately paced. With a running time of just over two hours, it's clear that some material could have been left on the cutting room floor without harming the flow of this film.

For the most part the acting is solid. Older experienced actors such as George C. Scott and Ronny Cox bring a strong confidence to the film while up-and-coming stars like Tom Cruise and Sean Penn exude a raw, unpolished charisma that would eventually make them Hollywood superstars. Since this story relied on many child actors, it's to be expected that some of the youths were not quite up to the task. Luckily they don't detract from Taps much.

And now for the bad. I really enjoyed Red Dawn – the escapist story of a group of American teenagers fighting off a Soviet invasion of America was implausible yet highly entertaining. Unfortunately the same cannot be said for Taps. While Red Dawn was never meant to be realistic and thus worked as pure entertainment, Taps takes itself far too seriously. The serious attempt at crafting a drama clashes with the absurd concept of children taking over a military academy and keeping the law at bay via machine guns and other military hardware.

When looking at the film as a whole, it's clear to me that Taps possessed top-notch cinematography and direction, and indeed brought some intriguing ideas to the table. But the sometimes-sluggish pace and the split identity mentioned in the paragraph above detracted from the overall effort, leaving it with an average score. Taps is worth viewing at least once; it's just not a film I'd want to view repeatedly.

Movie rating: 6 stars

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