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...Given the threat
of war in the air, military-themed movies bring
a particular resonance these days.
...But Tears
of the Sun doesn't need much help
from the anxiety level of the off-screen world:
in any era, this would be an engrossing and
powerful drama about a war-torn country.
...Bruce Willis
stars as a Special Ops commander who leads his
team of Navy SEALs into a jungle in Nigeria,
which has become engulfed in a brutal, choking
civil war characterized by wholesale ethnic
cleansing.
...Their search-and-rescue
mission calls for the extraction of an American
doctor (Monica Bellucci), but she refuses to
leave without the 70 defenseless African patients
in her care--far too many to be evacuated by
plane.
...Director Antoine
Fuqua (Training Day),
correctly confident that the human stakes are
high enough, lets his absorbing, affecting tale
play out without superficially pumping up the
brashness level or the action quotient: this
is a muscular movie that never becomes muscle-bound.
...The result is
a seeming action thriller with plenty of heart
and mind, a consummate combination of combat
strategy, nail-biting suspense, and compassion-stirring
drama.
...Willis is, as
ever, a sturdy leading man--laconic, intense,
and efficient. But it is Fuqua's measured approach--bolstered
by a thoughtful screenplay that incorporates
subplots, surprises, and subtext--that makes
the film especially rewarding in a time-well-spent
way.
...The unusually
poetic title (Hostile Rescue and Man
of War were among the abandoned candidates)
bespeaks not so much uncertainty of tone as
much as anxiety about the wartime marketplace.
This is a real-world armed-conflict saga in
the mold of Black Hawk
Down and Three
Kings that goes well beyond them
in the emotional-involvement department.
...We'll airlift
3-1/2 stars
out of 4 for the African-set war drama, Tears
of the Sun.
...A well-written,
evocatively-shot, smartly-paced, and true-to-its-subject
military thriller that's both drenched in sadness
and rescued by its genuinely heroic spirit.
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