Tears of the Sun

To critics, Tears of the Sun, amounts to so much spilt milk. The audience's tears are more likely to result from boredom, comments A.O. Scott in the New York Times about the movie which deals with the continued strife in central Africa. He adds: Buried amid the sodden rhetoric and the jungle muck is an honorable intention. The question of how military power should respond to human suffering is both knotty and interesting, but Tears seems positively spooked by any hint of complexity or by anything that might invite viewers to think too hard about either the characters or the world they (and we) inhabit. Several critics maintain that this is the hawkish movie that Willis wanted to make to show his support for President Bush's interventionist strategy in Iraq. Steven Rea in the Philadelphia Inquirer calls it a slick Hollywood combat picture that does double-duty as a U.S. military recruitment ad. He adds that it couldn't have come at a more opportune -- make that opportunistic -- time. Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times observes that the movie with its portrait of peerless American fighters making mincemeat out of dark-skinned bad guys ... offer[s] up a propaganda fantasy of how the administration thinks the impending invasion of Iraq is going to go. But New York Daily News critic Jami Bernard asks, Will a thinking audience really buy the image of helpless, grateful people bestowing kisses and victory songs upon Willis as the representative of all things American: power, guts, compassion? Joe Morgenstern in the Wall Street Journal comments that it would seem to be the movie of the moment ... an action-adventure that argues clearly for the moral application of American military might. ... But relevance can't rescue this would-be epic from the swamps of inertia, absurdity and sentimentality. Michael Wilmington in the Chicago Tribune suggests that the real problem with the movie is that it tries to show us simultaneously that war is thrilling and that war is hell. It ends up stranded in the middle, at war with itself.