Martyr complex fully engaged and full speed ahead, Bruce Willis is AK Waters (apparently named after the gun), a stone-faced lieutenant in the Schwarzenegger "Dutch" mode leading a band of highly-trained übermensh on a mission of mercy. The similarities to Predator over the first half of Tears of the Sun are startling (complete with unwilling female charge, token black soldier, pursuit in jungle, and the guerrilla raid of small village); the only real difference is that where John McTiernan's film is a model of the action genre (and, along with Back to the Future, the defining film of the 1980s), Fuqua's Tears of the Sun is an exercise in style over disturbing message.

A propagandist piece for the United States' policy of intervention, the film conspicuously uses an incident in which we didn't intervene (see Steven Silver's brilliant The Last Just Man) as a device to offer some sort of atonement as well as rewrite history. Would that propaganda and revisionism were all the film was invested in; rather, Tears of the Sun sets its sights on racial issues (Token Black Soldier says at one point, "Lt., these Africans, they're my people. You're doing the right thing"), concluding on a pair of speeches offered by a tearful black nurse. The first promises The Bruce that the collective We "will never forget you," the second gushes to noble (and hot) doctor Monica Bellucci that the again collective We "we will always love you." The picture becomes at this point a snow job of the first order: the end-title quote of Edmund Burke's dictum about bad things happening when good folks stand idly by is at that point just atonal overkill (reminding a great deal of The Contender's closing dedication "to our daughters"), and the carefully staged fawning and Indiana Jones native supplication is simply out of place in a movie that takes on a deadly serious topic with occasionally graphic imagery.

The film is noble-savage racist and flag-waving in equal measure--and even misogynistic in not only Belluci's hand-grabbed charge, but also in offering a white priest an on-screen martyrdom as a white nun gobbles helplessly when the scene shifts, fixed eternally in a state of hysteria. Fuqua, an African-American director who's been trying his best to be David Fincher over the course of his sepia-stained career, stages a reasonably compelling village-liberation sequence (and a ridiculously over-hyped finale), but spends the rest of the time indulging in new-millennial action devices like cell phone communications, the GPS chase, and the laptop computer shuffle. Trying to add some excitement to scenes that are basically calls between Willis and commanding officer Tom Skerritt, Fuqua has Skerritt standing on the deck of an aircraft carrier as planes take-off and land behind him--good for reception, probably not so great for the eardrums. As the cavalry rides in at last to evacuate our great white hopes (though the black soldier survives, he's incapacitated and, unlike The Bruce, without the loving ministrations of a ridiculous romantic subplot), the awe that the heretofore desperate refugees massed at the Nigerian border displays for our Yankee whirlybirds doesn't suggest a citizenry hardened from years of modern Civil War, but rather a band of savages genuflecting before a Zippo.-Walter Chaw