Tears of the Sun
Action/US/English (Japanese subtitles)/118mins
Cast: Bruce Willis, Monica Bellucci
Director: Antoine Fuqua
Sony Pictures
Tears of the Sun is an action movie with compassion. I don’t
mean that the good guys let some of bad guys live — there’s
precious little mercy in the violence. I mean that director Antoine
Fuqua is making a brave attempt to step outside the remit of the
standard Hollywood shoot-‘em-up and take on some real-world
issues.
There is a coup in Nigeria and the country goes into meltdown with
rival military groups warring and massacring civilians of any differing
ethnicity.
The US evacuates its own citizens and so it is
that Navy SEAL Lt. Waters, a.k.a. Bruce Willis, is dropped into
the maelstrom to rescue an American aid worker Dr. Lena Kendricks
(Monica Belluci). However, when Waters to sees the humanitarian
disaster on the ground he decides to disobey orders and get at least
a handful of doomed refugees out of the country. Then things get
complicated.
Tears of the Sun feels like two movies. One feels
like a film that asks how the West can remain disengaged from such
extremes of brutality and in which the actors hint at some real
sympathy with their roles — witness Willis struggling with
Water’s conscience. The other film is stock shoot-‘em-up
and wooden characterisation — the only depth in Belucci’s
role is in the cleavage revealed by her absurdly low cut T-shirt.
You can see Fuqua’s tactic here: fill the
seats with the promise
of action and chicks then hit the audience with a reality check.
The violence Fuqua is talking about does not exist in a bubble,
it
is part of a larger package of problems that beset poor countries,
and Fuqua’s grasp of the issues does not go beyond the machete
and the machine gun.
What could have been a meaningful exploration
of the West’s relationship with these damaged countries or
a powerful depiction of people in extremis turns into a long numbing
gun battle that does nothing more than champion good ol’ mission
accomplished values and leaves the audience how the ending could
be so far removed from the earler promise of the movie.
Matchstick Men
Comedy-Drama/US/English (Japanese subtitles)/116mins
Cast: Nicolas Cage, Alison Lohman, Sam Rockwell
Director: Ridley Scott
Warner Bros.
Nick Cage gives one of his best performances yet
as a neurosis-ridden conman — sorry, con artist — whose
life is turned upside down by both his past and his occupation.
The film also gives us an unexpected change of direction from director
Ridley Scott.
Roy (Nicholas Cage) is a mess. He is a mass of
tics, is pathologi-cally obsessed with cleanliness and ritual; he
is divorced, friendless, has no interests and dines exclusively
on canned tuna. The only thing that holds his life together is his
job: conning people out of their hard-earned cash — a job in
which he takes considerable pride, hence the insistence he is a
con artist and no mere con man.
Out of the blue he discovers he has a daughter
(Alison Lohman) from his long-finished marriage, and after the years
of living in an emotional vacuum meeting the girl, now fourteen,
upsets his carefully balanced life and leads to an audacious plot
twist that turns the film and the audience on its head.
Matchstick Men cleverly makes use of Hollywood
cliché offering us apparently familiar characters and situations
only to take them off in different directions, thus continually
undermining the viewer’s expecta-tions and creating a film
that is more than you assume it to be.
But don’t get too excited: this is Hollywood
and because this is Hollywood everything must be sweet in the end.
There are laws about this, I am sure, and Roy’s redemption
comes along just when it must for a trite off-the-shelf ending that
lets down the hard work of the previous two hours.
Cage carefully studied the plight of obsessive
compulsives in the hope of creating a stereotype-busting depiction.
Time will tell whether he has helped create understanding for sufferers
of chronic neuroses, but we can be sure he has turned in a performance
that deserves awards.
Ridely Scott has eschewed the epic and spectacular
for a closely and thoughtfully filmed drama. The director labelled
Matchstick Men
a comedy, but he has made something far bigger than a regular thigh-slapper.
Film Reviews: Chris Page
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