War is a nasty business. Rarely has it been nastier than in West Africa. From Foday Sankoh's mass amputations in Sierra Leone to Charles Taylor's vicious rebellion in Liberia, seldom has man seen such brutality inflicted on his fellow man. Likely next up on the hell-on-Earth rota is Nigeria, where religious and ethnic conflict boiled over last year because of an article written about the Miss World Pageant, of all things. Clearly, these people don't like each other.
The full horror of Nigeria's internecine conflict is brought home in the news footage that opens Tears of the Sun. Sadly, few Americans pay attention or care when newsreel footage about West African massacres is shown on television. However, they will pay attention when such atrocities are part of a Hollywood blockbuster starring Bruce Willis, which is exactly what Tears of the Sun is.
Actually that's not entirely true. Tears of the Sun is not your average multiplex fodder. It's a movie with a message, a surprisingly grim and serious film about the aforementioned horrors that take place every day in that most neglected of continents, Africa. It opens with a fictional civil war breaking out in Nigeria, one of the biggest suppliers of oil to the good ol' U.S. of A. In a military coup not unlike the one that brought the now-mercifully-dead former dictator Sani Abacha to power, one ethnic group, the Ebo, takes power and sets out to exterminate its rival, the Yoruba.
This strife has sparked a nationwide massacre across Nigeria similar to the civil war that wiped half a million Rwandans from the face of the planet. Of course, nobody in the Western world did anything about that genocide. In Tears, however, a Navy SEAL team led by Lieutenant A.K. Waters (Willis) is dropped into the midst of the slaughter, and, being sentient human beings, the men are sickened by what they witness transpiring around them.
Naturally, as this is a big-time action picture, these humans are badass soldiers, and decide to disobey orders and protect a group of refugees led by Italian-American doctor Lena Hendricks (Monica Bellucci) as they make their way to the Cameroon border. Anybody with military experience would tell you that the atrocities depicted — very graphically — in Tears wouldn't stir the soul of a highly trained commando like Waters — he would've seen it all before. However, sudden lapses of irrationally decent humanity are what Tinseltown scripts are based on, so Waters and his team do the right and dangerous thing, with many of them sacrificing themselves for the sake of rescuing a group of innocents.
If this sounds familiar, that's because it was done before (and better), in Three Kings. But that alone doesn't make Tears of the Sun a mediocre movie. It's a mediocre movie because director Antoine Fuqua can't decide if he wants to shuck off the clichés of mainstream filmic storytelling or embrace them. One minute, Mauro Fiore's breathtaking cinematography leads you to believe you're watching the next Apocalypse Now. The next, a cheesy McGuffin about a presidential heir and the sexual attraction between Willis and the inhumanly bodacious Belucci remind you that you're watching A REVOLUTION STUDIOS FILM, jam-packed with all the tropes that studio head Joe Roth demands of his employees. Tears of the Sun should be condemned for cheapening the tragedy of West Africa's civil wars with a cheesy plot. At the same time, it should be praised for showing the bloodshed in its full horror, since that's the only way many moviegoers will ever know such suffering exists in the world. | 
