Tears of the Sun

Washington Post Stephen Hunter

The film is a strictly no-bull proposition.

Dallas Observer Gregory Weinkauf

The movie remains engaging, with a couple of sequences verging on stunning.

Chicago Reader J.R. Jones

By turns morally compelling and racially paternalistic, this provocative drama may be the first halfway truthful war movie to hit multiplexes since "Three Kings."

Baltimore Sun Chris Kaltenbach

Whenever its noble aims miss, Bruce Willis saves it.

ReelViews James Berardinelli

Fuqua takes a genre picture and, by diverting the story onto an unconventional path, generates a sense of urgency. Tears of the Sun is not a great movie, but it is satisfying, and represents an example of accomplished filmmaking.

Charlotte Observer Lawrence Toppman

Fuqua and his writers, Alex Lasker and Patrick Cirillo, have delivered not only the most satisfying and plausible action movie in months but one that's accidentally timely.

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

Until it descends into mindless routine action in the climactic scenes, Tears of the Sun is essentially an impressionistic nightmare.

Boston Globe Wesley Morris

The film would be just as powerful, if less likely to saturate suburban megaplexes and flatter its patrons, were its saviors -- I don't know - French.

Washington Post Desson Thomson

This is an odd amalgam of bleeding-heart sentimentality and over-the-top guts-and-glory action. You're not sure how to feel. But you're certainly not as moved and stunned as you were in "Black Hawk Down."

The New Yorker David Denby

Tears of the Sun may be a flattering myth, but it’s not a bad myth to be flattered by. [17 March 2003, p. 154]

Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman

Left wing? Right wing? Center? Who cares, as long as Bruce Willis is saving the world.

Chicago Tribune Michael Wilmington

Fairly entertaining and often exciting, expertly done in a way, but not especially engaging or new, and not as emotionally involving as its title suggests.

Newsweek David Ansen

A schizoid action flick bogs down in lofty intentions.

Variety Todd McCarthy

This is one of those pictures that unavoidably becomes part of the zeitgeist due to its coincidental arrival at a precise moment in history when its themes play into current events.

New York Post Lou Lumenick

Tried to turn this into a replay of its 2000 military-rescue hitBlack Hawk Down -- though, in the end, it's almost totally lacking in the serious hardware and viscerally paced action that propelled Ridley Scott's movie to the top of the box office.

Philadelphia Inquirer Steven Rea

It's simplistic and reactionary and designed to get hearts pumping but not minds thinking.

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Rick Groen

The fiction that follows can be safely regarded as much more than a war movie -- hell, this is a pro-war movie. Were it a politician, it would be Donald Rumsfeld.

USA Today Claudia Puig

Unfortunately, it's not one-tenth as interesting as what you can see at home during a nightly cable surf as U.S. war policy is debated.

Christian Science Monitor David Sterritt

The result is hardly a subtle film, but it has a stronger sense of combat's real costs and consequences than more sensationalistic pictures like "Black Hawk Down" and "We Were Soldiers" provide.

TV Guide Maitland McDonagh

Has honorable aspirations, even as it becomes mired in mainstream movie conventions.

Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan

May make you weep, but not in the way anyone intended. Handsomely made, well-meaning but finally frustrating and unsatisfying, this perplexing film is an example of a previously unseen hybrid, the socially conscious, humanitarian action movie. It doesn't appear to be a genre with much of a future.

Slate David Edelstein

At times, you could actually mistake Tears of the Sun for a blunt modern parable instead of an opportunistic mixture of up-to-the-minute atrocities and old-fashioned corn.

New York Magazine Peter Rainer

In a movie with so much graphic suffering by innocent Africans, it’s a bit disconcerting that so much loving attention is paid to Bruce Willis’s anguished mug. There’s an uncomfortable Great White Father (and Mother) aspect to this movie.

Portland Oregonian Shawn Levy

Fuqua has made three films before his newest, Tears of the Sun, and they've all begun well enough but then collapsed under the weight of his heavy-handed visual technique and his indifference to plot, character and logic.

San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle

What pushes it above mediocrity is that it ends better than it begins.

LA Weekly John Powers

Despite the busy camera work, bombastic score and rapt attention to violence, director Antoine Fuqua (Training Day) can't mask the script's white-savior paternalism.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer Sean Axmaker

For a film so intent on the rules of engagement, this is hardly engaging drama.

Salon.com Stephanie Zacharek

There's a fine line dividing Hollywood tradition and overly manipulative junk, and Tears of the Sun crosses it.

Film Threat Rick Kisonak

Aside from a few routine battle scenes, the movie's action consists mostly of people slogging slowly through non-stop rain. This is not interesting, much less exciting. The dialogue is hokey hero blather.

New York Daily News Jami Bernard

A preposterous action movie in which a Navy SEAL makes the world safe for democracy one continent at a time.

The New York Times Dana Stevens

Unfortunately, the movie's real setting is a sentimental fantasy world, and its story is a spectacularly incoherent exercise in geopolitical wish fulfillment.

The Onion (A.V. Club) Scott Tobias

Impossible to swallow as truth, this Rambo treatment is equally hard to enjoy as escapism.

Rolling Stone Peter Travers

Director Antoine Fuqua (Training Day) can stage action, but he can't save a trivializing, reactionary script featuring a Hollywood star (read America) as a global savior.

Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern

Relevance can't rescue this would-be epic from the swamps of inertia, absurdity and sentimentality.

Austin Chronicle Marc Savlov

It’s as deadly dull as the blunt end of a rifle.

Village Voice Michael Atkinson

This "Black Hawk Down" theft is a trial by cliché until the climax, which suggests a dress rehearsal for the torching of Baghdad.