Tears of the sun (2003)

There are not many films that I count among 'worst films I have ever watched'. But Tears of the sun (Antoine Fucua) definitively belongs to them. It is a sentimental and morally corrupt film that uses women and racialized people as ploys in a conventional Rambo type of story. The ending does its very utmost to show the white man rescuing both the white, beautiful woman and the racialized women - from the racialized, brutish men, of course. The poorly written story is about a bunch of yankees, a group of doctors, who are to be saved from a war-stricken African country (the country conjures up the image 'any country') by the US Navy Seal. Bruce Willis plays the grizzled military guy who has seen too much and has hardened himself, but who in his saving mission is changing. The love of and for a woman changes him. She worked at the hospital and she won't leave. So he bribes her by letting in to one of her demands: that the people at the hospital are to come with them. Etc., etc. The war is reduced to a backdrop that is supposed to make us sympathize with an American man and woman. The natives become nothing but Suffering Creatures, without voices or agency of their own. Or - they are shown as brute killers, beyond the human. The entire movie is outrageously self-gratulating. It's trying hard to come out as a humane, sensitive portrait of war and human suffering. Instead: a glossy set of images that are soaked in excessive, exploitative violence and suffering that is a mere prop for a very calculated goal: to jerk out some tears. I was so angry after seeing this movie, that I could barely find words to describe my impression of it.