Tears Of The Sun

Release Date: March 7, 2003
Studio: Columbia Pictures, Revolution Studios
Director: Antoine Fuqua
Screenwriter: Alex Lasker, Patrick Cirillo
Starring: Bruce Willis, Monica Bellucci, Cole Hauser, Tom Skerritt, Paul Francis, Fionnula Flanagan, Eamonn Walker, Johnny Messner, Charles Ingram, Chad Smith, Malick Bowens, Akosua Busia, Nick Chinlund, Cornelia Hayes O'Herlihy, Peter Menseh
Genre: Action, Adventure
MPAA Rating: R (for strong war violence, some brutality and language)
Official Website: SonyPictures.com

Reviewed by Peter Veugelaers © 2003
- Better than a cheese royale: buy one while its hot

The African nation Nigeria is beset with civil unrest in Tears of the Sun. The rise of a dictator in the country where democracy is challenged by rebel factions sets the scene for a Navy Seals Lieutenant on a mission to bring back to America an aid nurse who is helping victims of the war in a village.

Lt. Waters (Willis) is commanded by his captain (Skerritt) to bring out Dr Kendricks (Bellucci) from the village, but she refuses to go until all her patients are permitted to exit past the border into neighboring country Cameroon.

Waters and Kendricks start off as clearly defined opposites with strong personalities. She belongs to a Catholic community whose primary concern is to heal the physical and spiritual wounds of survivors of the civil war. He is obeying orders; he’s doing his job.

He deceives Kendricks into thinking he will go ahead with her stipulation, and when he doesn’t she is in anguish over her patients left behind in the jungle. Waters, though, comes around to see the atrocities that the locals are put through and decides to help Kendricks in defiance of his captain. This movie seems to go beyond patriotism in that when Willis disobeys orders he faces within himself feelings that want to transcend the horrors of war around him. It is sublime in a way - he shares in the humanity of other’s suffering.

While Tears of the Sun is patriotic it steers a different course than your heavily patriotic U.S. military movie like last year’s We Were Soldiers. Good men can take lives in the name of protecting freedom and democracy (as in Soldiers) as well as save life in the course of normal military procedure.

Some complained that in Saving Private Ryan the idea that soldiers stopped their duties to save one man was trite. There is a similar idea in Tears of the Sun. The internal conflict in Waters, the larger scaled external rife and dilemma in the story and between characters Waters and Kendricks, is played emotionally strong – feeling is intense between characters, the subject matter is grave, the humane musical score played against the horrors of war able to stir audience emotion.

This is drawn-out in places, interspersed with some raw and brute war violence, is visually pleasing on the eye, and the final action sequence is a moving climax, one where I had been drawn in by the preceding scenes.