More good guys with guns

Grim-visaged, shavenheaded and intractable, Lieutenant AK Waters is the ultimate military machine. This is Bruce Willis in tough veteran mode as the ultra-hard US Marine in Antoine Fuqua's movie about a fictional Navy SEAL operation in civil war-torn Nigeria.

As the leader of an elite squadron parachuted into the interior to rescue a Medecins sans Frontieres doctor and a couple of nuns from a Mission hospital before the arrival of rebel forces, Willis jettisons the smart-ass, speedball jocularity that has been his stock in trade for most of his movies since the days of Moonlighting to become an unsmiling, by-the-book soldier, able to operate only according to orders.

This being a Hollywood movie, something happens during the course of the mission to alter all that. After duping Dr Lena Kendricks (Monica Bellucci) into believing that he will airlift most of her patients out with her, then forcing her on to the helicopter and abandoning the "indigenous personnel" to their fate on the ground, Waters suffers a crisis of conscience. In direct opposition to his orders, he turns back to lead the 60 or so refugees through the jungle to the safety of Cameroon.

This particular McGuffin is a familiar trope of US militarist movies, from The Sand Pebbles to Three Kings and is, I guess, yet another piece of propaganda for the folks back home in the US to show that however many guns and bombs they deploy (and however many innocents are accidentally remaindered by "friendly fire"), the American soldier is really a good guy after all.

Like Ridley Scott's Black Hawk Down (based, unlike this, on real events), Tears of the Sun opens with documentary footage of random shootings and maimed bodies to validate its (in this case) spurious reality.

How far this is excusable is open to debate; certainly, the production has gone to extraordinary lengths to people its cast with indigenous actors rather than African-American thespians transplanted from Hollywood. But the centre does not hold; Waters's sudden change of heart is too cliched to be much more than a plot contrivance and its gross sentimentality will do little to change the minds of those opposed to American military intervention in any arena of civil unrest. At least by creating a fictional scenario the film-makers avoid the accusation of rewriting history or delivering a wish-fulfilment fantasy of American foreign policy on an existing situation.

Fuqua (who has shifted successfully from MTV videos to feature films with The Replacement Killers and Training Day) is a visceral, actionbased director in the lavish style of John Woo (Mission Impossible II, Face/Off). He is less comfortable in his depiction of the stirrings of conscience than in his orchestration of jungle suspense and scads of explosive mayhem. The script is designed to illustrate the characters' philosophies in terse one-liners.

When a nun tells Waters to "Go with God", he replies: "God already left Africa." And having witnessed the sole African-American member of the squad looking unusually thoughtful for a Navy SEAL, it is only a matter of time before he makes the profoundly banal observation: "These Africans are my people, too."

That said, there is enough tension and violent action in the movie for it to qualify as a respectable, if worthy, militarist adventure, with Willis and his grizzled band wearing their gear and operating their weapons with ruthless and authentic efficiency.

As the missionary doctor, Bellucci perhaps reveals a little more cleavage that is strictly de rigueur for the jungle (think of those insect bites) and she always appears to have had a lipstick handy, even in the midst of a firefight.