Staring Contests
by Ed Owens

Tears of the Sun follows Bruce Willis and his determined scowl on a routine mission that goes horribly awry when Willis develops a conscience (while still maintaining said scowl). After a military coup in Nigeria, the Seals are sent in to evacuate a small group of foreign nationals, primarily a doctor (Monica Bellucci, who, unlike Willis, has two looks, concerned and pouty), from a local mission. Knowing that the refugees will be slaughtered if left behind, Willis decides to save them as well.

Director Antoine Fuqua has always been good with individual scenes (remember manic cop Denzel Washington's interrogation of crippled crack dealer Snoop Dogg in the otherwise overrated Training Day?), but continues to struggle with bringing it all together. Tears of the Sun features some very powerful scenes (the desertion of the refugees by the military prior to Willis' epiphany and the slaughter of rebel soldiers in the village come to mind), but the film meanders in between, frequently getting mired in sloppy writing that substitutes caricature for character and dialogue for depth ("For our sins," Willis scowls, just before the climactic battle). Like the aforementioned Training Day, Sun winds up an average genre pic undone by its own sense of self-importance.

Part of the problem is the film's complete failure to earn its development. After Willis coldly and callously abandons the fleeing refugees to certain death, he is suddenly inspired to go back for them after passing over the remains of the mission, a jumble of burning buildings and bloody bodies. Willis epiphany comes too quickly, too casually, for the audience to accept it on any but the most superficial of levels. Such shallow development makes it all the more difficult to care about the fate of the characters later in the film.

While Willis stares determinedly at everything, Ben Affleck, in the recent hit Daredevil, does his best to stare at nothing as the blind Matt Murdock. Murdock is a scrupulous lawyer by day ("We only deal with people who are innocent.") and an unsavory hero by night, jumping around and beating up criminals he failed to convict earlier.

The rest is a superficial mess, with the finished film playing more like an early draft. The movie careens wildly from scene to scene with no real concern for flow or pacing, and characters pop in and out like a cinematic whack-a-mole. Further complicating the whole thing is the film's ongoing battle to find a tone. Director Mark Steven Johnson (who formerly helmed the John Irving weepie Simon Birch) strives for a darker than usual tone (the film is a great deal grittier than last year's Spider-Man), but can't resist the occasional tongue-in-cheek reference. The result is nothing short of abrasive, a disconcerting mix of hard-edged violence and silly throwaways that never quite gels.

Affleck does his best mock raspy voice while Jennifer Garner, as Elektra, does pretty much what she does every week on Alias. Only Colin Farrell, as the arrogant and lethal hitman Bullseye, really seems to be having any fun (Michael Clarke Duncan is absolutely wasted as the menacing Kingpin, giving nothing more to do than...well...look menacing for most of his relatively short appearance onscreen). The superhero shorthand of character development is here stripped to its barest essentials, providing us so little information that the characters are lacking even by the relatively low standards of the genre.

©2003 Ed Owens
CineScene