| 90 |
Washington Post
The film is a strictly no-bull proposition.
|
| 80 |
Dallas Observer
The movie remains engaging, with a couple of sequences verging on stunning.
|
| 80 |
Chicago Reader
By turns morally compelling and racially paternalistic, this provocative drama may be the first halfway truthful war movie to hit multiplexes since "Three Kings."
|
| 75 |
Baltimore Sun
Whenever its noble aims miss, Bruce Willis saves it.
|
| 75 |
ReelViews
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.
|
| 75 |
Charlotte Observer
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.
|
| 75 |
Chicago Sun-Times
Until it descends into mindless routine action in the climactic scenes, Tears of the Sun is essentially an impressionistic nightmare.
|
| 75 |
Boston Globe
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.
|
| 70 |
Washington Post
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."
|
| 70 |
The New Yorker
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]
|
| 67 |
Entertainment Weekly
Left wing? Right wing? Center? Who cares, as long as Bruce Willis is saving the world.
|
| 63 |
Chicago Tribune
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.
|
| 60 |
Newsweek
A schizoid action flick bogs down in lofty intentions.
|
| 60 |
Variety
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.
|
| 50 |
New York Post
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.
|
| 50 |
Philadelphia Inquirer
It's simplistic and reactionary and designed to get hearts pumping but not minds thinking.
|
| 50 |
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
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.
|
| 50 |
USA Today
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.
|
| 50 |
Christian Science Monitor
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.
|
| 50 |
TV Guide
Has honorable aspirations, even as it becomes mired in mainstream movie conventions.
|
| 50 |
Los Angeles Times
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.
|
| 50 |
Slate
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.
|
| 50 |
New York Magazine
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.
|
| 50 |
Portland Oregonian
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.
|
| 50 |
San Francisco Chronicle
What pushes it above mediocrity is that it ends better than it begins.
|
| 50 |
LA Weekly
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.
|
| 42 |
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
For a film so intent on the rules of engagement, this is hardly engaging drama.
|
| 40 |
Salon.com
There's a fine line dividing Hollywood tradition and overly manipulative junk, and Tears of the Sun crosses it.
|
| 40 |
Film Threat
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.
|
| 38 |
New York Daily News
A preposterous action movie in which a Navy SEAL makes the world safe for democracy one continent at a time.
|
| 30 |
The New York Times
Unfortunately, the movie's real setting is a sentimental fantasy world, and its story is a spectacularly incoherent exercise in geopolitical wish fulfillment.
|
| 30 |
The Onion (A.V. Club)
Impossible to swallow as truth, this Rambo treatment is equally hard to enjoy as escapism.
|
| 25 |
Rolling Stone
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.
|
| 20 |
Wall Street Journal
Relevance can't rescue this would-be epic from the swamps of inertia, absurdity and sentimentality.
|
| 20 |
Austin Chronicle
It’s as deadly dull as the blunt end of a rifle.
|
| 20 |
Village Voice
This "Black Hawk Down" theft is a trial by cliché until the climax, which suggests a dress rehearsal for the torching of Baghdad.
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