Being Crushed By A Tank Might Be Preferable

I tried watching Tank 432 because the premise of a team of mercs taking refuge inside a tank sounded promising. Maybe it was going to be like the ending fight scene in that Brad Pitt movie Fury. It was not at all like that.

The mercs have taken/rescued two people with sacks over their heads, who turn out to be young women. The whole group is being pursued by enemies, or perhaps just one. One that appears suddenly from nowhere, and isn't bothered by bullets. Now I'm thinking supernatural being, maybe these are his brides? "Outgunned soldier-types against the paranormal" isn't new, but it can be fun to watch. Mysterious Guy keeps his distance, always just pops up to spur their panic a little.

The team finds another young woman inside a shipping container sitting at some abandoned farm, and their leader orders her brought along as well. They take cover inside an armored carrier sitting in the middle of a field somewhere, and take refuge, but seemingly trap themselves inside. With no water, a wounded man, weird tapping noises coming from outside, a medic whose response to every situation is to jam people with sedatives or give them pills, and a leader who doesn't lead, only writes endlessly in his notebook. The tension rises, things aren't as they seem, and things end poorly.

It's a dull film, given all that. There's tension, but there's rarely any payoff. There isn't that ebb and flow where the tension breaks with some bit of action that changes the aituation or presents new problems, so the tension can rise again. It appears and then sits like, like a fart in a closed room. I kept waiting for something to happen. Unless you count the soldier who really needed to poop, and finally he does. And then falls backwards into it 30 seconds later.

The mass freak out at the end seems to be because it's the end of the film, rather than built up to properly. The hints and clues were there, but they weren't pulled together properly. So the end is a dud of a payoff for sitting through the film. I think it was an attempt to not simply sit there and spout exposition at us at the end, which is fine, but maybe a little exposition would have helped. Some reason to care, some better sense of the point of the whole thing.

The movie presents the whole thing as the threat really being inside their heads and they don't know it, but the external threat does exist, they just don't understand what it really is, either. The film is trying to do one thing, but undermines it at the end.