Review of Tears of the Sun (2003) by Jake H — 14 Mar 2015

So I just watched Tears of the Sun, and it was a pretty decent action movie. Granted it's by no means flawless.

As someone who watches a lot of action flicks in general, I've really come to like the work of director Antoine Fuqua. I really think he's one of the few directors in Hollywood that knows how to do good, pulse pounding, and practical action sequences, as well as tension. Granted the films of his that I have seen (Shooter, Olympus Has Fallen, and The Equalizer) aren't by many means deep on an artistic level, I still find them incredibly fun to watch. They know what they are, and don't try to be anything else. Tears of the Sun is a departure from those films previously mentioned.

The story of the film, based on a real life mission conducted by Canadian Special Forces in South America, follows a squad of Navy SEALs as they insert into an unstable Nigeria to extract a nurse and a few other missionary workers. The mission gets complicated when the nurse refuses to go with them unless they can rescue the other innocent lives from the oncoming onslaught of war. The leader of the SEAL team, played by Bruce Willis, now must choose between following orders, and doing what's humanely right.

When you get down to it, Tears of the Sun is really just a slightly more dramatic action movie. It aims to be very high minded, but it's pretty simple storytelling, and it really doesn't delve an awful lot into the human moral aspect of the story. Amongst the actors, Bruce Willis was undoubtably the best. We all know he can do action, but in his performance alone he was able to add some depth to his character. The rest of the SEALs were well acted, but they weren't given much time to flesh out their own personalities. Monica Bellucci also did a pretty decent job, though her character often came off to me as naive to the predicament they were in. Maybe that's my inner military strategist being a cynical asshole. Wouldn't be the first time.

On the more positive side, this is an action movie, and Antoine Fuqua works his directorial magic in the many tense and pulse pounding action sequences in this movie. The terror of war is realized in a few disturbing scenes of genocide, and the final battle was pretty darn intense. What I think worked a lot in the film's favour when it came to the deadly stuff is that the characters didn't feel invincible. The lack of deep running character development can be a blessing and a curse. Sometimes you build up a character so much that it's pretty hard to able them as expendable. By not making the characters all that deep, but still liable to the point that you give a shit, it really added to the intensity because any character could be killed at any given time. To wrap things up, the cinematography was beautiful, and the soundtrack was great as well.

Tears of the Sun definitely has a higher agenda on its mind, but it really doesn't get that across effectively. But there is a decent story here, as well as some good performances and action.