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Tears of the Sun
EMAILPRINTSony Pictures Entertainment

Mixed or average reviews
Based on 36 critic reviews
How did we calculate this?
Based on 39 votes
Read user comments
Rate this movie >
Movie Info
Genre(s): War
Written by:
Alex Lasker
Patrick Cirillo
Directed by: Antoine Fuqua
Release Date:
Theatrical: March 7, 2003
DVD: June 10, 2003
Running Time: 118 minutes, Color
Origin: USA
Summary
RATING: R for strong war violence, some brutality and language
Starring Bruce Willis, Monica Bellucci, Fionnula Flanagan, Johnny Messner, Tom Skerritt, Eamonn Walker, Charles Ingram, and Malick Bowens
Bruce Willis stars as Lt. A.K. Waters, the loyal veteran officer of a Navy S.E.A.L unit. When he's sent into the heart of Africa, the usually hard-bitten Waters finds himself deeply conflicted at having to choose between following orders and the dictates of his own conscience. (Sony)
Also On Metacritic
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Also On The Web: Internet Movie Database View The Trailer Official Studio Site
What The Critics Said
All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...
Dallas Observer Gregory Weinkauf
The movie remains engaging, with a couple of sequences verging on stunning.
Read Full Review >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."
Read Full Review >Baltimore Sun Chris Kaltenbach
Whenever its noble aims miss, Bruce Willis saves it.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >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."
Read Full Review >The New Yorker David Denby
Tears of the Sun may be a flattering myth, but its 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.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >Philadelphia Inquirer Steven Rea
It's simplistic and reactionary and designed to get hearts pumping but not minds thinking.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >TV Guide Maitland McDonagh
Has honorable aspirations, even as it becomes mired in mainstream movie conventions.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >New York Magazine Peter Rainer
In a movie with so much graphic suffering by innocent Africans, its a bit disconcerting that so much loving attention is paid to Bruce Williss anguished mug. Theres an uncomfortable Great White Father (and Mother) aspect to this movie.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle
What pushes it above mediocrity is that it ends better than it begins.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >Seattle Post-Intelligencer Sean Axmaker
For a film so intent on the rules of engagement, this is hardly engaging drama.
Read Full Review >Salon.com Stephanie Zacharek
There's a fine line dividing Hollywood tradition and overly manipulative junk, and Tears of the Sun crosses it.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >The Onion (A.V. Club) Scott Tobias
Impossible to swallow as truth, this Rambo treatment is equally hard to enjoy as escapism.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern
Relevance can't rescue this would-be epic from the swamps of inertia, absurdity and sentimentality.
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.
Read Full Review >What Our Users Said
The average user rating for this movie is 6.5 (out of 10) based on 39 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
Marcus P gave it a10:
One of my all time favorite movies, great action, good story and Monica Bellucci what more can a guy ask for?
Frank L gave it a2:
Professionally made awful movie: to be avoided. The plot is only realistic for people showing afrike in south amerika on the map. Completely undeveloped characters just relying on standard clichés (saves character build time) this movie just relies on what would be the imagination of a 12 years old writer playing with his lego-soldiers. All thumbs down.
[Anonymous] gave it a7:
The brutality of Africa is shown in great detail. the action is great, although the ending is a little cliched.
Aaron A. gave it a10:
One of my all time favourite films, FULL STOP.
Tim C. gave it a9:
Excellent movie - has superb acting with an very good plot.
David S. gave it a 2:
Okay, let me say I rented this movie for free and it was a total waste of my time. The characters are so flat and cliched its hard to feel symathetic toward any one of them. I mean come on! These tough badass soldiers suddenly have a change in heart?! yeah right. The dialouge was horrible and the death scenes were so over dramatized I felt like I was reading a last-minute college term paper. This is class A garbage. And the message? Well, lets just say that oddles of war movies cover the same hollywood abbused "moral message".
Soryu gave it a 10:
Great movie, very realistic battles and the best spec ops team work (especially IA drill in the last battle sentence) I ever seen inthe war movie. hooyah
