Americans Atoning for African Slaughters
By A. O. SCOTT
Recent history offers plenty of examples of civil war, ethnic strife and genocidal violence, but none of them apparently suited the purposes of the folks who made "Tears of the Sun." Instead, the filmmakers chose to invent their own third-world conflict, and rather than follow the time-honored Hollywood tradition of confecting some wholly fictitious San Something-or-other or Whereverstan, they decided to plunge the actual nation of Nigeria into bloody chaos.
As the movie begins, we learn that a military coup against the country's democratically elected government has unleashed horrific mayhem, carried out against Christian civilians by Muslim military men (sometimes identified as rebels, sometimes as the national army, but always outfitted in green khakis and crimson berets). The subsequent scenes - of rape, of mutilation by machete, of feral child soldiers - represent a collage of recent real-world African atrocities, evoking wars in places like Rwanda, Liberia and Sudan. Nigeria certainly has its problems, including serious religious and intertribal friction, but it has thus far been spared such carnage.
In the moral scheme of "Tears of the Sun," however, Nigeria itself is, if not entirely irrelevant, at least a temporary convenience. Its disintegration is staged to allow the West - specifically the United States military - to atone for its failure to halt those other slaughters. It is often said that politicians and generals are always fighting the last war; in this case, Alex Lasker and Patrick Cirillo, the screenwriters, and Antoine Fuqua, the director, appear to be applying Rambo-style revanchist methods to a Clinton-era debate about humanitarian intervention. The action takes place largely in a dark and murky rain forest, and it unfolds in the metaphorical shadow of Bosnia, Somalia, Kosovo and Vietnam.
...[T]he movie's real setting is a sentimental fantasy world, and its story is a spectacularly incoherent exercise in geopolitical wish fulfillment. Bruce Willis, with the weary, haunted stoicism that has been his trademark since he gave up the smirky frat-boy bonhomie that made him a star, plays A. K. Waters, a Navy Seals lieutenant dispatched into the jungle to evacuate Lena Kendricks (Monica Bellucci), an American doctor who tends the wounded at a remote and vulnerable mission. In no uncertain terms, the doctor, whose khaki blouse appears to be missing its top three buttons, informs her would-be rescuer that she will not leave the refugees behind. She slaps the lieutenant and spits in his face, which helps to spark a crisis of conscience. He tells the rescue helicopter to turn around and, in direct violation of orders, to take the youngest and frailest Nigerians to safety.
The rest of them, along with Dr. Kendricks, Lieutenant Waters and his men, must make their way through the jungle to the Cameroon border with a platoon of murderous soldiers in hot pursuit. Back on the American aircraft carrier, Waters's superior officer (Tom Skerritt) is unable to supply air support, though he turns out to be remarkably forgiving when his subordinate unilaterally declares war, disobeying rules of engagement that permit him to fight only in self-defense. The Americans come upon a village in the middle of a massacre and, with furious professionalism, cleanse it of ethnic cleansers. Then they reconnoiter and declare their willingness to sacrifice their lives to bring their charges to safety, and their resolve is met with tears of gratitude.
The audience's tears are more likely to result from boredom, irritation at Hans Zimmer's wretched fake-world-music score and inadvertent amusement at the thunderously earnest dialogue and Ms. Bellucci's awkward line readings. (She has now made movies in three languages; whether she can act in any of them is an open question.) One of Waters's men (Eamonn Walker), who is African-American, declares, "These are my people, too," and urges his commander to persevere on their new mission. When the mission is almost over, a grateful African woman says: "We will never forget you. God will never forget you."...
<http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/07/movies/07TEAR.html> *****
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Yoshie
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