Bruce Willis ends his brief hiatus from action movies to strap on the M-16 for a little rumble in the jungle in Tears of the Sun.
As Lieut. A.K. Waters, Willis heads up a Navy SEALs team sent into Nigeria following a bloody coup by Muslim guerrillas to evacuate a doctor who happens to be the daughter-in-law of a U.S. senator.
Problems arise, however, when Lieut. Waters meets Major Cleavage, aka Dr. Lena Kendricks, aka ill-cast Italian beauty Monica Bellucci. The good doctor refuses to leave the country without the refugees in her care, prompting Waters to lie about evacuating them all in order to get her to the extraction point.
But a funny thing happens in the jungle to single-minded soldiers, particularly when you stumble across a little ethnic cleansing.
From the look on Willis' face, a stony Sgt. Rock-like stare that never changes throughout the film, it's clear he's seen this kind of thing before. It's also evident to anyone who's caught the trailer that when push comes to shove, he won't be able to abandon the refugees.
Tears of the Sun eerily parallels in many ways the 1994 Rwandan civil war in which a massacre followed the withdrawal of UN troops who had been protecting the minority Hutus.
It's the kind of mistake Waters won't allow to be repeated, so he defies orders and sets out to get all the refugees safely into Cameroon. During the trek through the jungle the soldiers begin to connect with the refugees, seeing them as more than "packages."
Director Antoine Fuqua (Training Day) attempts to convey the same message to moviegoers, not through dialogue, but by using the camera to capture the emotion on their faces as they witness one horrific scene after another. Particularly brutal is the massacre of a village which includes shots of a woman who has had her breasts cut off so she won't be able to feed her newborn.
"It's what they do," one of the refugees simply states, in an attempt to explain to the westerners the inhumanity of the guerrillas.
But when the bullets eventually do begin to fly, and they do so in Blackhawk Down-like fashion, there isn't enough of a connection to care about anyone other than the main characters -- and even that is tenuous.
Tears of the Sun would have been a much better film had it strictly focused on the band of Navy SEALs and the Willis character's struggle to find redemption in the refugees he's trying to save.
Instead, it uses a shotgun approach that leaves us with an action movie without enough action, a study of the human condition that is black and white, and a struggling love story that doesn't get past Belluci's pouting lips, which raises the film's deepest query: How do you stop lip gloss from fading in the jungle heat, anyway?
(This film is rated AA)
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