The movie wisely never gives us too much: Each commando has a face, a personality, a set of quirks, but no backstory. Equally, you admire her for willing to get with the gunky work of action pix, which is to get grimy, sweaty, bloody and have a mother of a bad hair day. But then Fuqua never plays up her beauty, and she's one of those performers with what might be called life force: You feel her belief in her cause, which is the mainspring of the plot. Would the SEALs have stayed behind if the doctor were played by, say, Linda Hunt? Maybe not, whereas just about anybody would have stayed for Monica. With his team and the 70 refugees, they go for a little walk in the warm African sun.īellucci's presence in the center of a holocaust seems quite unlikely. When the commandos get there, she refuses to leave without "her people." It's part of the romanticism of the piece that the team commander, El Tee Waters ("El Tee" being military speak for Lieutenant, i.e., Lt.) tries to swindle her into going, then kidnaps her but finally has a change of heart - knowing that those he leaves behind will become bayonet dummies for the pursuing soldiers - and waves off the air evacuation. Her jungle hospital lies in the way of a rebel army column. In this brilliant variation from director Antoine Fuqua, a SEAL team is sent to the interior of Nigeria to rescue an American missionary doctor (Bellucci, whose citizenship by marriage explains her Italian accent). Do they stay and fight, or do they run? Well, we all know that if they run, there's not much of a movie, right?
#Tears of the sun weapons professional#
All of these plots turn on the honor of professional soldiers of the highest alpha-classification when they are faced with something that is not in their own best interest but clearly moral in meaning. It has been used as recently as 1999's "Three Kings," set during the Gulf War, and at least as far back as "The Magnificent Seven" (1960), which I suppose in turn tracks to "The Seven Samurai" (1954). The story might be called classic or trite, take your choice. (Humphries was also the military adviser on "Black Hawk Down," where he achieved a similar sense of verisimilitude.) There's no speechifying, and when the guys go to the radio, the militarese they spout has the terse poetics of the actual stuff. He has given the movie a quiet, confident, almost documentary feel, as well as getting so many of the little things right - the proper guns, for example, and the SEAL penchant, unique in the service, for going into battle with scarves wrapped tightly around the head. He would seem to know what he is talking about. The technical adviser behind "Tears of the Sun" is Harry Humphries, who spent 16 years as a SEAL, including time in Vietnam. He doesn't even kiss the girl, and since the girl is Monica Bellucci, that gives you some idea of his discipline! He just looks, as soldiers do and are, really tired most of the time. The film is a strictly no-bull proposition: Bruce Willis, who never met a quip he didn't like, has been enjoined to keep his yap shut and play his team leader's role with wary grace and almost pure silence. One of them is the glee it takes in expertise, special operations variety, as it chronicles this tough, laconic crew's odyssey across a fictitious Nigerian civil war.
The pleasure of that moment is profound if subversive: Even you highly evolved, post-national pacifists out there will probably enjoy the spectacle of highly trained American commandos with suppressed weapons moving through the glades and lanes with the grace and purpose of athletes and - pffft! pffft! pffft! - serving up justice in 9mm portions, hot and steamy.īut the movie has other pleasures, less subversive but just as profound. But then they run into one very teed-off U.S. They're laughing, they're drunk, they're having the time of their lives.
They are shooting the men, raping and mutilating the women and getting rid of the kids any way that's convenient. An African death squad is in the process of destroying a village for the crime of belonging to the wrong tribe. "Tears of the Sun" offers one of the greatest never-happened-but-should-have moments in movie history.