Tears Of the Sun

Cast: Bruce Willis, Monica Bellucci Direction: Antoine Fuqua The title is quite lyrical. The normally bankable Bruce Willis is the film's centreforce. And the director is Antoine Fuqua, who crafted the engrossing bad-cop thriller, Training Day, which fetched Denzel Washington the Best Actor Oscar last year. Hence we expect Tears Of The Sun to be a worthwhile foray into the never-say-extinct genre of war movies.To say our hopes are shattered would be an understatement. Overblown and extremely tedious, the film doles out yards of heavy-handed dialogue interspersed with the mandatory bouts of pyromaniacal action. The outcome is certainly nowhere near the league of some recent combat dramas like Ridley Scott's Black Hawk Down or Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line. If Denzel Washington was an irredeemably corrupt cop in Training Day, Fuqua opts for the other end of the vice-and-virtue spectrum this time around. Willis is presented as a military officer blessed with a conscience the size of a baseball stadium. The good lieutenant of the Navy SEALS is assigned the task of rescuing an American woman doctor (Bellucci) who runs a Catholic mission in the jungles of strife-torn Nigeria. The trouble is that the super-committed doc refuses to leave without the refugees under her protection. The lieutenant must now choose between carrying out the orders of his superiors or pitching in his lot with the beleaguered doctor in her crusade against ethnic genocide. The director squanders what could have been a high-tension drama by depending far too much on verbal and visual bombast. After a while, the machine-gun fire and assorted explosions become an earsore. The lush Nigerian location, recreated in Hawaii, do not help in alleviating the gloom. Willis, as bald as yesteryear's Telly Savalas, seems to snooze and mumble through a stereotyped role. And so we end up shedding a tear or two for the utterly uninspired state of some of the Hollywood movies of today.