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Tears of the Sun

Bruce Willis takes on the bad guys, again.

FILM FACTS

Starring: Bruce Willis and Monica Bellucci
Director: Antoine Fuqua
Rating: R for strong war violence, some brutality and language
Genre: Action, War

Discuss this film | Official movie site

On DVD 06/10/03 (R) 118 minutes

Grade: C

Verdict: Cries a river of clich�s, but gets the job done.

By ELEANOR RINGEL GILLESPIE
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

In the present climate, a good combat movie wouldn't be such a bad thing. "Tears of the Sun," the new Bruce Willis flick, isn't that movie. How do I know? An entire reel was skipped at the critics' preview screening (then tacked on to the end) and it didn't really matter. In a good movie, it would.

Still, "Tears of the Sun" isn't an altogether bad movie. Unlike recent Willis shoot-the-gun-and-run efforts, "Armageddon" and "The Siege," this movie takes itself seriously, even if it does have a title that would've been ridiculed throughout a "Seinfeld" episode.

The film takes place in Nigeria, where brutal ethnic cleansing is ongoing. Lt. A.K. Waters (Willis) and his crack team of Navy SEALs are dispatched to rescue Dr. Lena Kendricks (Monica Bellucci), who's been tending to the rebel army's victims. Finding the doc is easy. She's the one in the heavy eye makeup and the shirt with the top four buttons undone. But she insists, hell no, she won't go, unless her patients go, too.

What's a hero to do?

You've seen this picture or a variation on it a hundred times, and you've probably seen it done better by grizzled pros such as the late Sam Fuller. It's the sort of movie in which the minute a lookout says, "Never mind, that was just a wild pig," you know he's going to get shot. Or the kind of movie where a baby's gurgle could give everyone away to the rebels who are tracking them through the jungle.

Give Willis this: He's got his game face on and his jaw clenched in classic Clint. Characters die -- even ones we would've cared about if we'd been given the chance to get to know them. And the cinematography occasionally invokes "Apocalypse Now's" steaming downpours and blood-red sun. Director Antoine Fuqua ("Training Day") at least knows which movies to steal from. Bellucci, so magnificent in "Malena" (she's also in the upcoming "Matrix Reloaded"), is used miserably. She's stuck in a silly peekaboo role where her heaving and barely covered breasts get to do more acting than she does. Her, um, co-stars are impressive, but they reduce a bravura actress to a distraction.

She's better than this, and Fuqua should know better.

"Tears of the Sun" is essentially a string of clich�s, but they are tried and true. Meaning, on the one hand, they could be unfamiliar and therefore exciting to younger moviegoers. And, on the other, longtime armchair soldiers will get the old-ways-are-good-ways fix they want.

The simplistic politics and questionable implications that the needy of the world will always require Captain America to take care of them are predictable and, ultimately, negligible (especially when one thing the movie does do well is remind us that we have a heckuva military). But when you've seen real movies like "Black Hawk Down," "Tears of the Sun" seems merely to connect the dots.