Tears of the Sun

God's already left Africa

A review by Mike Shea Movie Rating: ( 0) DVD Rating: ( * * * * · )

There was an argument against Die Hard war movie. It doesn't work and has no right to drag us through such horrors for such a lame movie.

Tears of the Sun is based within the darkest depths of "ethnic cleansing" in Africa. Read George Orwell's "Politics and the English Language" and learn why terms like "Ethnic Cleansing" need to be destroyed. Tears of the Sun is very much like the overused terms Orwell speaks of. It wraps torture, rape, and murder in a nice pretty blue package with a yellow bow on top. Tears of the Sun has an idiotic plot that uses typical Hollywood stereotypes and insults the audience after brutalizing us for almost three hours. After four days in a swamp our beautiful damsel in distress still has perfectly pink lipstick that won't smear at all no matter how many bullets you fire at her. Tie in a "he's not only the president's heir but also the tribal king that can save the world" plot twist and any credibility this movie had is destroyed. I should have known how bad this movie was going to be the minute smarmy Bruce Willis steps off of the helicopter. Not since Tom Cruise rode up on a big phallic motorcycle in Days of Thunder did I laugh so hard at a character introduction. Bruce Willis is a better actor than this.

The DVD of Tears of the Sun got better treatment than the movie deserves. It had a clear 2.35 to 1 16x9 picture that showed off the perfect skin and shiny white teeth of Antoine Fuqua fellate himself over this celluloid roadkill didn't sound very entertaining to me. There is no DTS track, but really, who cares. I sure as shit don't.

I am normally opposed to ever skipping or searching through a movie, but I did so through the last ten minutes of Tears. What I found was a great clarity of how thin the movie really was. Flashes of a young handsome prince being cheered on by his loving people built a perfectly meaningless and impossible ending. Add in a scene of touching closeness between our scarred scraggly hero and the young pretty 20something white woman he saved from the clutches of this barbaric place with hints of a possible relationship in the future. If it ended with Bruce in a pit being tortured by African rebels or in Leavenworth for disobeying about fifty direct orders, it would have been a far better movie. The typical Hollywood ending just perfectly bookended this thin transparent movie who bit off more human suffering than we should have been forced to chew. Tears of the Sun is worthless crap.