As planned I saw Tears Of The Sun on the way home from work today. I'd actually been looking forward to this because it's an action movie with good credentials (Bruce Willis typically does well and the director did both Training Day and The Replacement Killers) and it got two thumbs up from Ebert and Roeper. This typically means that the movie was at least made well - whether you like it is your own business. But since I like action movies, I look forward to those that are done well.

This one is. But you have to ignore the politics of what's going on, especially in the final act. This is really a movie about some Navy SEALs that are really good at what they do, which is kick ass. It also tries to be a big message movie about interventionism and the atrocities of ethnic cleansing. The problem is those issues are too big for this movie, so they don't really reasonate. This makes the film feel preachy as it tries way too hard to pull on your heartstrings. They really needed to leave the character conflict where it belonged - with Bruce Willis' character. He has lots of tough choices to make, and does a reasonable acting job showing them. But the film is muddled with everyone else's drama - losing the potency of Willis' conflicts. At the very least they should include the doctor and the other SEALs, but only as devices for the main character's issues.

The cinematography was great. Lots of wonderful shots of the jungle, and lots of very dark scenes. If you're interested in this movie you need to go see it in the theater, since the darkness in all those scenes will not work well on all but the best calibrated TV sets. All I noticed about the music was that it was overbearing, always overdoing it when they show the bad guys.

There were several military inconsistencies, but none of them were terrible. The big thing is I would have liked is to see the SEALs do more evasion. Make it more of a cat and mouse game in the jungle. That combined with the character changes above would have really elevated this film to a new level.

Bottom line: If you like action movies, don't mind having your emotions played with, and can deal with some really nasty ethnic cleansing stuff (you've been warned, it's ugly) - then you should go check this one out.

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