Black Hawk Down

Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan

His is a triumph of pure filmmaking, a pitiless, unrelenting, no-excuses war movie so thoroughly convincing it's frequently difficult to believe it is a staged re-creation.

San Francisco Chronicle Bob Graham

It is an exceptional accomplishment.

USA Today Mike Clark

Black Hawk turns nightmare into great cinema.

New Times (L.A.) Luke Y. Thompson

Doesn't just kick your ass. It pummels your entire body; it leaves you trembling.

Time Richard Schickel

It takes its place on the very short list of the unforgettable movies about war and its ineradicable and immeasurable costs.

Portland Oregonian Staff (Not credited)

Scott superbly re-creates the sense of individuals facing astounding odds, with barely a few minutes' respite over a 12-hour battle.

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

Films like this are more useful than gung-ho capers like "Behind Enemy Lines." They help audiences understand and sympathize with the actual experiences of combat troops, instead of trivializing them into entertainments.

The New Yorker David Denby

I've rarely seen so selfless a collection of performances and, in a war movie, so general an absence of rhetoric or guff. [25 & 31 Dec 2001, p. 127]

Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold

Rivets our interest for its entire lengthy running time. And it does this without any of the usual war movie clichés, false heroics, barracks-humor nonsense or grandstanding absurdities.

Washington Post Stephen Hunter

The next worst thing to being there. That's how real it feels.

Rolling Stone Peter Travers

A personal best for producer Jerry Bruckheimer, a triumph for Scott and a war film of prodigious power. You will be shaken.

Austin Chronicle Marc Savlov

Absolutely harrowing, shocking in its sudden revelatory immediacy, and very, very well done, Black Hawk Down is one of the best depictions of the outright lunacy inherent to battle I have ever seen.

New York Daily News Jack Mathews

What we need to remember, what Black Hawk Down reminds us, is that there are no safe missions when you're chasing bad guys. Especially when you have to chase them down a hole.

Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez

An overwhelmingly tactile experience. Scott brings you so close into the action, the grit and smoke and blood seem to spill off the screen and into your head.

ReelViews James Berardinelli

One hell of a ride. For better or for worse, it will leave you stunned and reeling.

Chicago Tribune Michael Wilmington

It's one of the most ferociously convincing physical re-creations of warfare ever put on screen.

Chicago Reader Lisa Alspector

Though passionate, doesn't pity or flatter the rank and file.

Newsweek David Ansen

As brilliantly shot as it is brutally single-minded, this is a war movie shorn of all its usual accouterments: the battle is the plot.

Washington Post Desson Thomson

You're drawn in, like it or not. You can't get away from the immediacy. Or the feeling that you're getting sucked in, too.

Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow

Black Hawk Down, in the end, is a docudrama. But it's sensationally well done, and it opens up a battlefield that needed to be documented.

New York Post Jonathan Foreman

A beautifully filmed, scrupulously authentic but strangely evasive exercise in combat ultra-realism.

Philadelphia Inquirer Steven Rea

Throw in the music -- a wall-to-wall whorl of Eastern modal dirges, thumping rock and Celtic-y skirl -- and you've got a veritable cinematic rhapsody of war.

Entertainment Weekly Lisa Schwarzbaum

Even an audience moved to tender patriotism might wonder how Scott, a proven master of ''Gladiator''-size visual showmanship, could have bombed away the personality of every man fighting until he's left with nothing more than pure combat.

Boston Globe Jay Carr

Character is almost wholly subordinated to a blast-furnace rendering of the hell into which they're dumped. Seldom will you see so many US military body parts strewn around a movie screen.

Film Threat Tim Merrill

It’s a true endurance test, far too grim to be considered exciting, but not really informative enough to enlighten us about the effect of our presence in Somalia in 1993.

Salon.com Andrew O'Hehir

An endless battle scene in search of a movie. It's every bit as harrowing -- and also every bit as pointless and misguided -- as the botched military mission it depicts.

LA Weekly Manohla Dargis

In the end, neither the appealing cast -- nor the force of Scott's stunning imagery is enough to make us understand why these men died.

TV Guide Ken Fox

No doubt captures some of the horror and the chaos of the actual situation, but it makes for a loud, often confusing, and always bloody two and a half hours.

Variety Todd McCarthy

Goes down like stiff medicine, leaving one feeling exhausted relief when it's finally over.

The New York Times A.O. Scott

Sitting through the accomplished but meaningless Black Hawk Down is like being trapped in an action film version of "Groundhog Day," condemned to sit through the same carnage over and over.

Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern

Functions mainly as an action extravaganza, and a numbingly depersonalized one at that.

Village Voice J. Hoberman

It's a Jerry Bruckheimer art film, perhaps the most extravagantly aestheticized combat movie ever made.

Christian Science Monitor David Sterritt

Perhaps they truly believe war is an inescapable aspect of human life. If so, why make movies that rub our faces in its horror? If artists have no antidote to war's evil or insight into the suffering it brings, their motive in depicting it must be merely to sensationalize its terrors and make money from the morbid fascination it holds for audiences. We deserve better.