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COPYRIGHT 2003 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
"Tears of the Sun,"the new military adventure movie starring Bruce Willis, is a troubled dream of Africa. The physical terrain (with Hawaii standing in for Nigeria) is a stunningly beautiful fantasia of dark high grass surrounded by thick rain forests; the human terrain is a sorrowful tangle of ethnic cleansing and atrocity. Directed by the gifted African-American Antoine Fuqua ("Training Day”), "Tears of the Sun"is visually alive, and the movie tries, within the severely formulaic limits of action-adventure films, to be morally alive, too. A crack unit of eight Navy seals, led by Lieutenant A. K. Waters (Willis), is dropped into Nigeria in the middle of civil strife between the Muslim majority and the Ibo Christian minority. The team's assignment is to rescue an American citizen, the Italian-born doctor Lena Kendricks (Monica Bellucci), before Muslim soldiers reach her Catholic-mission hospital. When the Americans arrive, however, the doctor refuses to leave her patients, and Waters, using a ruse to separate her from them, pushes her into a rescue helicopter. But then a twist: aloft, he sees what the marauders are doing to the Ibo, and he turns the helicopters around and goes back to rescue the remaining patients. The Americans, with an assorted group of men and women in their charge,...
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