Tears Of The Sun Review

10 Mar, 2003 by John Hawkins

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Tears Of The Sun Review: I caught “Tears Of The Sun” this week-end and I can’t say that I was terribly impressed. The movie was set in Nigeria which was supposed to be in the middle of a violent coup complete with savage ethnic cleansing and genocidal murder sprees (think Rawanda). A team of SEALs led by Bruce Willis is sent to get some missionaries out of the country. Unfortunately, things start to go wrong at that point. Three of the missionaries refuse to go and the other won’t go unless the SEALs take 30 or so Nigerians from with them. Let the mission creep begin! So Willis does decide to take the Nigerians with them and plans to leave them when he gets to the drop point, a decision that nearly gets them all killed. Things get progressively worse from there as Willis decides to take all the Nigerians to Cameroon which leads to an army of Nigerian rebels trying to hunt down the SEAL team and the civilians in order to slaughter them.

The action scenes in the movie, other than the outstanding “village scene”, were mediocre and cartoonish, especially towards the end. You got to see SEALs running directly towards unknown assailants who were firing rockets at them, lots of shooting at clumps of grass that might or might not have had anyone behind them, and a handful of SEALs out in the open desperately trying to hold off 40 or 50 men at close range in a scene that reminded of the massive bloodless firefights in the A-Team TV series. Furthermore, there was almost no character development. The SEALS are little more than skilled killers, the Nigerians are personality free people in trouble, and the bad guys are simply automatons who exist for no other reason than to be shot and killed by the SEALs.

The other thing that bothered me was that I got the feeling that the movie was trying to give the impression that Willis was doing the right thing by trying to get those Nigerian civilians out of harm’s way, but truthfully, it was a huge mistake. So they saved thirty Nigerians — was it worth American lives to do it especially when another 5000 people were probably being slaughtered at the same time in locations all over Nigeria? I don’t want to give away too much, but at the end we have Africans saying, “oh we’ll love you forever” to Americans and you know what I was thinking? “Sure you will — in 6 months you’ll be cursing America for not giving you big enough bags of rice.” Watching a bad movie is one thing. But, watching a bad movie featuring a SEAL leader wasting his men’s lives on a largely futile mission and then having the movie act as if it’s a commendable thing just makes it that much worse. This movie gets a big thumbs down.