Black Hawk Lite

"Tears of the Sun" manages to score a few points, but only casually so. (Film Review)

by Michael Sean McGowan

    The best thing about Tears of the Sun is its title.  When a movie trailer features Bruce Willis in head-to-toe cammo picking off multitudes of faceless baddies who regenerate with the kind of fury you only see in a Playstation 2 shooter, it makes you scratch your head to wonder how it landed a title that sounds like it belongs to a novel on the Pulitzer prize nomination list.  Add to this the fact that the movie's marketing proudly boasts that it is "from the director of Training Day" (which, in my opinion, is a fact you probably should hide, not shout) and it leaves a person to ask one question:

    What the hell kind of movie are they trying to make here?

    Strangely, watching Tears of the Sun never quite gives you an idea.  Do I mean this in a bad way?  Not necessarily.  For the most part it is a movie with ambitions that I would not expect from a Bruce Willis programmer.  But just because I said that, don't walk away with the thought that all of these ambitions are realized.  The movie lands smack-dab in the midpoint between run-of-the-mill and extraordinary.  It is better than you would expect, but not as good as it could have been.

    It at least gains points for adding more real texture than the weak and generic The Recruit had the gumption to.  The movie opens with the typical CNN-ish news reports telling of warfare and genocide in Nigeria where Islamic rebels have overthrown the democratically-elected government and are moving against Christian populations in the south (in reality, last year over 200 people died in rioting that resulted from religious anger over the Mrs. World beauty pagent), meaning that native villages and missions in the way are in trouble.  A team of Navy SEALs is sent in to one mission to rescue the wife of an American doctor, although why she is considered so important to focus an entire rescue mission on is never really clear.

    When Lieutenant Waters (Willis) arrives on site, he finds the doctor antagonistic and not ready to leave indigenous refugees behind to be slaughtered.  At this point Waters has to make a choice- leave the people behind and fly out in helicopter, or escort the 70-so refugees to the border of Cameroon, but if you have already seen the commercials to this movie, you really don't have to spend much time pondering what the outcome will be.

    This is where the give and take of the movie begins.  It isn't shy about setting its story in a real context where other films would take place in made-up (or, better yet, unidentified) countries with victims and villains who have no basis in reality but have really funny names.  I've done some background work on the conflict in Nigeria- not scholarly, but enough to say that the story is credible in at least a Hollywood sort of way (although, in real life, the violence between the two religious populations is more of a two-way street than depicted in the film).  Tears of the Sun also, for an action film, is refreshingly light on the machismo.  For the first half of the film Willis and his team barely even speak except for the shouted orders and commands that sound fresh off the crisp tongue of an on-set military adviser.  By the second half, when the Important Life Lessons set in and we are exposed to some tinny platitudes in the school of do the right thing, the movie never resorts to militaristic grandstanding, unlike Behind Enemy Lines in which some idiot thought audiences would mistake Owen Wilson for John Wayne.

    But... for all of its plusses I couldn't help but to feel that Tears of the Sun stopped short of what it could do.  The movie's moral theme is rather pat and free of complication (remember the two-way-street I mentioned earlier).  We are exposed to plenty of scenes of the grisly effects of genocide (especially in one protracted sequence in which Willis' team interrupt the ethnic cleansing of a village) but never feel like the movie is trying to egg us on, get us pissed off about the injustice it sees in the world.  The script appears to have some insight into its story, but only modestly so and the ending does become plagued by the "let's praise the heroic White man!" syndrome.  Right before the ending titles there is a quote from Edmond Burke about how evil flourishes when good men do nothing, yet the story's convictions are far outstripped by its ambitions and what we are left with is a technically proficient, occasionally credible shoot-em-up.

    Probably the biggest falling is that Tears of the Sun invests little in its characters.  Willis is the only stand-out in most of the cast; his SEAL team is an amorphous blob of actions and dialogue that is hard to sort out in either name or face.  None of these men talk like they have distinct personalities (a feat that Black Hawk Down managed despite the fact that it far less time for window dressing).  Rather, they serve some rather base technical functions: to warn of danger and to give Waters something to react to.  As a result, when the film climaxes in a showdown with rebel forces in a field near the Cameroon border, we can't really place the soldiers who are getting picked off in front of our eyes.  As I said, Tears of the Sun seems to stop winsomely short of doing everything exactly right.

    It is an old movie critic axiom, but I think it applies well here: Tears of the Sun is movie that is far easier to admire than to love.  Willis is a big enough star to flex some serious creative muscle and here he at least makes some wise decisions about where the movie should go (consider it: this movie was originally scripted to be the fourth installment of the Die Hard series).  Tears of the Sun is not the kind of regrettable entry that comes to mind when you think of the star of Armageddon or Hudson Hawk, but I can only think of what could have been accomplished if Willis had decided to fight a real war.  B