Release Date: March 7, 2003
Starring: Bruce Willis, Monica Bellucci, Cole Hauser, Tom Skerritt
Directed by: Antoine Fuqua
Written by: Alex Lasker, Patrick Cirillo
Distributed by: Sony Pictures Entertainment
MPAA Rating: R (strong war violence, some brutality, language)
When you think of a movie that involves Bruce Willis saving the day, images of a bloodied, barefoot man leaping from a tall building to the cry of “yippie-kai-yay,” or a grizzled, foulmouthed oil driller destroying an asteroid that threatens to wipe out all of mankind may immediately come to mind. And for good reason, because Willis’s most memorable characters are those who play the hero first and ask questions later. But though Tears of the Sun fits the bill for another Willis-saves-the-world kind of picture, once it gets underway those archetypal images quickly disappear.
It’s directed by Antoine Fuqua, who follows his popular police drama Training Day with another exciting thrill ride that has a bit of heart and compassion as well. Though the story lacks some character development and eventually becomes perhaps too sappy for those expecting a hard-boiled war film, for the most part though, Fuqua took a good cast and familiar crew and made a film that comes close to the caliber of contemporary war classics like Black Hawk Down.
Willis plays Lt. A. K. Waters, a veteran Navy SEAL who is sent into action in the jungles of Nigeria to save an American doctor, Lena Hendricks (Monica Bellucci), from a politically volatile region. However, Waters and his team get more than they bargained for when Hendricks refuses to leave without the 70 refugees that accompany her. Waters’s conscience gets the better of him, and he agrees, contrary to his commander (Tom Skerritt)’s orders, but the group will have to march through enemy lines before they can reach the safety of the Cameroonian border.
Tears wastes little time in getting into the story (which is really about making the right choices when peoples’ lives are at stake), which is unsettling at first but a nice change of pace where Hollywood’s sometimes windy theatrics are concerned. Sometimes a movie doesn’t need a lot of exposition, especially where Willis’s star vehicles are concerned. However, the audience admittedly doesn’t know much about Waters, and whether the choices he makes are in character or not -- is he a habitual rule-breaker, or is he just doing this for the sake of the movie -- and it’s only because Willis is playing him that Fuqua and the film’s four screenwriters get away with this.
At least they’re consistent, though. In a particularly interesting scene toward the end of the movie, Waters takes a moment to poll the mood of his men before taking them into combat. Normally, in a picture like this, the commanding officer bellows the orders and everyone follows blindly, but Waters himself has been defying orders for the entire movie so it makes sense that he might be more democratic about things.
Though the script isn’t flawless, Fuqua does make up for things by keeping the movie’s pace quick. Cinematographer Mauro Fiore, editor Conrad Bluff, and production designer Naomi Shohan, who all worked on Training Day with Fuqua, doubtlessly helped in creating another visually powerful film (one powerful scene involves a Nigerian woman laying in the pool of her own blood with her infant baby nearby) with a smooth rhythm and a convincingly chaos-ridden atmosphere.
Fuqua also did a good job of balancing the battleground setting with the political issues that lie beneath the SEALs’ actions. He pulls off both successfully similar to the way Ridley Scott did it in his Black Hawk Down, although Scott’s movie was by far the better of the two. Adding to the likenesses is the combination of ambient music and original score by Hans Zimmer and Mel Wesson, which puts the viewer inside the jungle with startling ease: Wesson and Zimmer also collaborated on the music for Black Hawk Down.
Indeed, Tears of the Sun combines a good mixture of action and moral ambiguity (coincidental because the movie’s theatrical release comes at a time when the nations of the world are faced with the same situation in Iraq). Despite this thematic power, some will probably still see Willis up on the screen being Bruce Willis, but hopefully the majority of audiences will see and respect the tough decisions that armed forces personnel when the higher-ups in government send them off to war.
-- Michael J. Eiff (eiff@email.arizona.edu)