ollywood just doesn’t know how to turn ethnic cleansing into entertainment.


Like the fossils in the Bush administration, the old guard “good guy vs. bad guy” thinkers in Hollywood are struggling to keep up with modern warfare. They’ve had some successes: think how well the show 24 uses the war on terrorism, turning our deepest fears into a fantasy that educates (are there legitimate uses for torture?) and titillates (with its cast of gold-plated hotties). 24 turned everyone’s worst nightmare – a nuclear explosion on U. S. soil – into bona fide white-knuckle entertainment. But what can you do with genocide in nations like Rwanda, where the world ignored a human catastrophe?


Tears of the Sun takes a serious and noble look at a confusing situation, and just like the world’s governments, it can’t handle it. The story’s basic: Nigeria has exploded into civil war, and Bruce Willis is a naval special ops guy who has to evacuate foreign nationals from the countryside. Hardened, stoic and bald, he leads his men into hostile territory to rescue a doctor played generically by Monica Bellucci.


But Bellucci insists on taking a few dozen refugees along with her. Willis tricks her onto a helicopter and ditches her Nigerian friends, but in mid-air he spots a burned out village full of dead bodies – and he has a change of heart. Even though he’s probably seen countless massacres in his time, Willis is so moved by this one that he turns the choppers around, goes back to the clearing where the refugees are still standing around waiting, and starts leading them to the border - traveling by foot, with a hell-bent rebel militia closing in from behind.


When that’s stretched over two hours, however, all you get is a movie about a bunch of people walking through the woods. Director Antonie Fuqua (Training Day) has a terse style, but with so little story to tell, he ends up with dead air. Nobody fires a shot for the first hour: the only thing my audience dug was footage of a yawning baboon. The one or two big fight scenes are halfway cool, but it’s hard to care about the outcome when the characters are so flat. Willis’ men are mud-splattered drones that don’t even have generic traits like “this one always smokes a cigar,” or “that guy tells jokes.” And Willis is the biggest disappointment. I’ve liked his work in better films, but here he has so little to work with and so few lines of non-military dialogue that he comes off like another wind-up toy.


But easily the worst thing about the movie is the war itself. Most good war movies, from the classics (The Longest Day) to the conflicted independents (Three Kings) to the gung ho slaughter fests (Rambo: First Blood Part II), are set against real wars in real countries. While there’s plenty of murder and mayhem taking place in Africa, the exact conflict in this film was made-up – the filmmakers either didn’t have the courage or the research budget to set it in Rwanda. And we don’t even learn much about what they invented: the movie skirts all details and avoids any depth. Apparently the Muslims are killing the Christians, but we don’t hear much about it; in fact, we don’t hear much at all about the politics, the international response, or anything else that could complicate it.


That cripples Willis and his men, who have no context for their actions and barely give a reason for going rogue. The Americans find a village that’s under attack: they go around stopping rapes and picking off murderers, and that’s all great, except that morally it’s as interesting as watching someone stop at a red light. The one gutsy decision they make – to save the refugees instead of just completing their mission – looks easy and obvious, because Willis’ role as part of the military goes totally ignored. He’s effectively mutinied but nobody seems pissed off, and his commanding officer (Tom Skerritt) never goes farther than “strongly suggesting” what he should do next. What, they don’t give orders in the navy?


While Willis and his men have done a good thing, they only saved a few dozen of the hundreds of thousands of people who would meet gruesome ends in a conflict like this. Where’s the American military? Where’s the rest of the world? We haven’t made much headway in Africa lately, nor has anyone been up for it – for reasons way beyond what this movie can delves into, although Three Kings had plenty to say about the first Gulf War, and dozens of films have criticized Vietnam.


Fuqua doesn’t tackle the larger context, yet it seems like he wants to: he closes on the Edmund Burke quote, “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.” That's a nice sentiment, and I'm sure Bush'll take that one all the way to Iraq. But a flick like this proves that finding a just course of action - or even making one up - has never been harder.