Tears Of The Sun Review

Bruce Willis has been steadily moving into maximum action, minimum dialogue films. The latest is Tears of the Sun, set in Nigeria where a coup has taken place with the bad guys, i.e. the Muslims, gaining power. Christians, particularly American Christians have to be evacuated. Willis plays crack Navy SEAL Lieutenant A.K Waters who's assigned to remove Lena Kendricks, Monica Bellucci, a doctor working in a remote region of Nigeria from the approaching forces of rape and pillage. She's not born American but she married one who's now dead. But Lena is reluctant to leave her patients behind, so Waters agrees to footmarch all those able to walk the 14 kilometres to where the helicopters will pick them up. All that matters to Waters is the mission but then he experiences sudden enlightenment when he sees the decimation done to the village they've just left. This interminable film is so jingoistic, with such phony situations and phony performances that it becomes a source of anger watching it. It's almost offensive in the way it exploits the terrible experiences of people in Africa today. It's so unsubtle in the way it portrays the Americans as heroic saviours, Nauseating! This is quite a long movie at nearly two hours and most of it is spent walking through jungle (shot in Hawaii) to sombre tension-inducing music. This is very much the sort of movie I despise. It has heaps of dollars thrown at it, a puerile script, ludicrous casting and filmmaking by numbers. Director Antoine Fuqua, who made Training day, which I also loathed, seems comfortable with it all.