Tears of the Sun
Columbia Pictures | Release Date: March 7, 2003 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
48
METASCORE
Mixed or average reviews based on 36 Critic Reviews
Positive:
12
Mixed:
17
Negative:
7
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
90
Washington PostStephen Hunter
The film is a strictly no-bull proposition. Read full review
80
Dallas ObserverGregory Weinkauf
The movie remains engaging, with a couple of sequences verging on stunning. Read full review
80
Chicago ReaderJ.R. Jones
By turns morally compelling and racially paternalistic, this provocative drama may be the first halfway truthful war movie to hit multiplexes since "Three Kings." Read full review
75
ReelViewsJames Berardinelli
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. Read full review
75
Baltimore SunChris Kaltenbach
Whenever its noble aims miss, Bruce Willis saves it. Read full review
75
Charlotte ObserverLawrence Toppman
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. Read full review
75
Chicago Sun-TimesRoger Ebert
Until it descends into mindless routine action in the climactic scenes, Tears of the Sun is essentially an impressionistic nightmare. Read full review
75
Boston GlobeWesley Morris
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. Read full review
70
The New YorkerDavid Denby
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]
70
Washington PostDesson Thomson
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." Read full review
67
Entertainment WeeklyOwen Gleiberman
Left wing? Right wing? Center? Who cares, as long as Bruce Willis is saving the world. Read full review
63
Chicago TribuneMichael Wilmington
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. Read full review
60
NewsweekDavid Ansen
A schizoid action flick bogs down in lofty intentions. Read full review
60
VarietyTodd McCarthy
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. Read full review
50
San Francisco ChronicleMick LaSalle
What pushes it above mediocrity is that it ends better than it begins. Read full review
50
L.A. WeeklyJohn Powers
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. Read full review
50
New York Magazine (Vulture)Peter Rainer
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. Read full review
50
Portland OregonianShawn Levy
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. Read full review
50
Los Angeles TimesKenneth Turan
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. Read full review
50
SlateDavid Edelstein
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. Read full review
50
New York PostLou Lumenick
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. Read full review
50
Philadelphia InquirerSteven Rea
It's simplistic and reactionary and designed to get hearts pumping but not minds thinking. Read full review
50
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Rick Groen
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. Read full review
50
USA TodayClaudia Puig
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. Read full review
50
Christian Science MonitorDavid Sterritt
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. Read full review
50
TV Guide MagazineMaitland McDonagh
Has honorable aspirations, even as it becomes mired in mainstream movie conventions. Read full review
42
Seattle Post-IntelligencerSean Axmaker
For a film so intent on the rules of engagement, this is hardly engaging drama. Read full review
40
SalonStephanie Zacharek
There's a fine line dividing Hollywood tradition and overly manipulative junk, and Tears of the Sun crosses it. Read full review
40
Film ThreatRick Kisonak
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. Read full review
38
New York Daily NewsJami Bernard
A preposterous action movie in which a Navy SEAL makes the world safe for democracy one continent at a time. Read full review
30
The New York TimesDana Stevens
Unfortunately, the movie's real setting is a sentimental fantasy world, and its story is a spectacularly incoherent exercise in geopolitical wish fulfillment. Read full review
30
The A.V. ClubScott Tobias
Impossible to swallow as truth, this Rambo treatment is equally hard to enjoy as escapism. Read full review
25
Rolling StonePeter Travers
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. Read full review
20
Austin ChronicleMarc Savlov
It’s as deadly dull as the blunt end of a rifle. Read full review
20
Village VoiceMichael Atkinson
This "Black Hawk Down" theft is a trial by cliché until the climax, which suggests a dress rehearsal for the torching of Baghdad. Read full review
20
Wall Street JournalJoe Morgenstern
Relevance can't rescue this would-be epic from the swamps of inertia, absurdity and sentimentality.
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