TEARS OF THE SUN
Willis plays Navy Lieutenant A.K. Waters, leader of a special-ops
team sent into war-torn Nigeria soon after the country’s
democratically elected president was overthrown in a bloody coup
by a military Muslim dictator who plans to seize control. The
president and his entire family has been assassinated by rebel
troops who are now roaming the countryside exterminating the loyal
Catholic population. Waters’s team is instructed by his superior,
Captain Bill Rhodes (Tom Skerritt), to evacuate American Dr. Lena
Hendricks (Monica Bellucci), a priest, and two nuns from a remote
mission hospital before the rebels get there. However, when he
and his team arrive (via a nighttime parachute drop, the filming
of which apparently killed a stuntman), Dr. Hendricks refuses
to leave the mission unless Waters and his team are willing to
take everyone. What had been planned as a quick and simple airlift
rescue becomes a supervised nature hike to the Cameroon border,
through many miles of dense jungle under enemy control with several
dozen men, women, and children, some of whom can’t even walk
very well.
But the trouble really starts when Waters and his men (Cole
Hauser, Johnny Messner, Nick Chinlund, and several others) witness
some rebels doing a little “ethnic cleansing” in a small
village, and conscience gets in the way. Horrified by the violent
manner in which the Muslim soldiers are behaving, they do the
only humane thing and start shooting them—in direct contradiction
to Rhodes’s orders of defensive engagement only. This attracts
the attention of a massive rebel force with its own supply of
cleanser bottles, while simultaneously forcing Capt. Rhodes (who
always seems to think that the best place on an aircraft carrier
to make a phone call is the flight deck with jets launching every
2.3 seconds) to utter that greatest of Navy mottoes, “You’re
on your own.”
Apparently Willis wanted to make this film “to show his
support for President Bush’s interventionist strategy in
Iraq.” Let’s see: this movie is about a hasty and ill-advised
American military attack against a foreign army perpetrated by
one man who has been told not to do it by most everyone he knows,
but because he is on his own in a position of power, he does it
anyway, drawing many innocent civilians and American solders into
the slaughter and ultimately to their deaths. Hm. It does sound
familiar.
Okay, I promised myself I wouldn't get started. Regardless
of the intentions behind this film or whatever its message is
supposed to be, it is certainly well-acted by Willis and Bellucci—who
manage a subtle mutual respect without going overboard into trite
romantic territory—and by their supporting cast, with some
beautiful Hawaiian scenery (most of the shooting occurred on Oahu)
thanks to cinematographers Mauro Fiore and Keith Solomon. But
director Fuqua’s pacing is a serious stumbling block to the
film’s success as an action thriller. I realize that “hurry
up and wait” is a familiar exercise in military activity,
but it doesn’t need to be depicted with such painstaking
authenticity in the movies. The tension doesn’t really get
going until over an hour into the film, and so much of it takes
place at night or in the dark, sometimes you can’t even tell
what’s going on.
Moreover, as has been a problem in his past movies, Fuqua fails to get us to really like any of the characters. The brutality perpetrated by the villains is matched so well by the protagonists, and even the relationships between the good guys are so strained, we have trouble getting behind anyone. I suppose the ending is supposed to seem victorious, with the grateful natives (those who have not been killed) hugging and waving and singing to the departing soldiers (those who have not been killed), but I just couldn’t feel the thrill of victory after watching all the carnage. Shucks—I guess I’m just un-American. ***
