Review – Taps

When a movie combines war and children, you can pretty much bet that you’re in for some heavy-handed fare. The interesting part about this production is that when the heavy hand finally falls, it’s a little hard to tell exactly where it lands. Timothy Hutton stars as the chief cadet at a military school headed by a crusty old blood and guts general played by George C. Scott. The school’s trustees want to shut the place down and sell the land to a condo developer, a process accelerated when Scott shoots a local boy in an altercation. Hutton and his fellow cadets decide that honor and tradition compel them to take up arms and seize the school. What follows is a couple of hours’ worth of drama that can’t seem to decide if it’s a bittersweet tribute to the childish simplicity of antiquated military ideals or a cautionary tale about the dangers of adhering to honor codes without thinking critically about the consequences of one’s actions. Either way, most of the entertainment value contained herein isn’t in the story or the dialogue as much as it’s in the acting, and even then the real interest stems almost entirely from the number of late teens/early 20s actors who went on to bigger and better things. Hutton really didn’t, but he’s supported by such luminaries-in-training as Tom Cruise, Sean Penn, and several other recognizable faces. See if desperate