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TEARS OF THE SUN by Tom McCurrie
Doing two things at once is usually a bad thing. Jumping on a pogo stick while trying to disarm a nuclear weapon for instance. Unfortunately, TEARS OF THE SUN proves the same goes for scripts.
(Warning: Spoilers Ahead!)
In Alex Lasker and Patrick Cirillo's screenplay, Bruce Willis plays a hard-as-carpenter-nails SEAL who has to rescue "American by marriage" Monica Bellucci (that explains the Italian accent, I guess) from war-torn Nigeria. Trouble is, she won't budge unless she takes along a bunch of indigenous friendlies, something not in the mission plan. But after seeing some up-close-and-personal ethnic cleansing, Bruce has a change of heart and guides the villagers to the Cameroon border, pursued by those very same cleansers.
Now I must admit I was looking forward to TEARS. I love R-rated action flicks that have heroes calling down the thunder and delivering righteous violence on the heads of deserving baddies. Body-count movies like COMMANDO, DIE HARD and TRUE LIES are manna from shoot-em-up heaven for me.
Unfortunately, TEARS doesn't want to be a straight-ahead action movie. It has the "loftier" ambition to be a drama with action. Or maybe it wants to be an action flick with drama. It's really hard to tell, so we're left with an unwieldy hodgepodge that fails to satisfy fans of either genre.
Let's start in the action column. First of all, TEARS OF THE SUN is a horrible title for an action flick. It sounds like a sappy family drama, or the brand name of a particularly odious orange smoothie.
And for an action flick, we get very little action. TEARS is way too slow in the first half, though the action quotient picks up by the mid-point when Bruce and his team "clear" a village of enemy soldiers. But the climactic jungle fight is a nothing-special exchange of gunfire and napalm we've seen a hundred times before. Inventive set-pieces are definitely MIA.
Worst of all is the tone. Action flicks are supposed to be fun, even if they're egregiously violent (sometimes because they're egregiously violent). The cartoonier the action the more enjoyable it is. But TEARS is rooted in a subject too dark -- and too real -- to be enjoyed as an action movie: ethnic cleansing. Instead of amusing escapism, we get endless massacres of innocent villagers, and what should be a fun action movie turns into a dreary, miserable tour of human depravity.
OK, but all this doesn't mean squat if TEARS is a drama. A more discriminating audience would have no problem with ethnic cleansing. Drama fans seek out challenging subjects, the more thought-provoking the better.
But TEARS doesn't work as a drama, either. For a drama to score, you need full, rich characters, and TEARS doesn't have ?em.
Bruce's LT is underwritten to the point of incomprehensibility. Especially problematic is his motivation. Why does he disobey orders to rescue the villagers? He's upset by the horrors of ethnic cleansing, true, but surely this vet has seen atrocities before. What made him put everything on the line this time? This question remains unanswered.
Maybe if they had a prologue where Bruce's inaction on another mission caused someone (maybe a child) to perish in a brutally violent way, we'd believe his sudden transformation from stolid solider to rule-breaking humanitarian. As it is now, his moral choice remains totally unconvincing.
His character is also annoyingly self-obsessed. By disobeying orders and leading the villagers on a perilous trek to Cameroon, he jeopardizes the lives of his entire team without a second thought. Then, when the pic is almost over, he has the nerve to finally ask his men if they want to go along on the mercy mission! Since they're only a few miles from the border and 5,000 enemy troops are on their butts, does he actually expect them to say no? I'm surprised they didn't mutiny!
It doesn't help that Bruce underplays the role to death. It's like he went wild on Botox and paralyzed his entire face. None of the Happy Go Lucky "Yippie-Ki-Yay" dude here. Bruce's lifeless puss saps whatever energy the movie has left.
His love-interest Monica is also a cipher, making any romantic sparks well nigh impossible. How can you believe a love affair if you don't believe the characters? Of course, the supporting SEAL Team members are so thinly defined calling them one-dimensional would be charitable.
As the saying goes, you can't have everything. This is especially true for scripts. So pick a genre and stick to it, or the audience may pick a different movie.
Responses, comments and general two-cents worth can be E-mailed to gillis662000@yahoo.com.
A graduate of USC's School of Cinema-Television, Tom McCurrie has worked as a development executive and a story analyst. He is currently a screenwriter living in Los Angeles.
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