Portraits of Badassery: Tears of the Sun

Now this movie might seem like an odd choice to call out when there are clearly many films worthy of a Portrait of Badassery. I certainly agree, there are a lot of films that are certified badass and I intend to give them their time to shine. Predator and Conan spring to mind as future entries.

Why did I choose Tears of the Sun? Because I just watched it and it is totally badass. For you troglodytes that have not yet seen the film, it stars Bruce Willis in what is arguably one of his coolest roles since the good Die Hard movies or Moonlighting.

Bruce is Lt. A.K. Waters, the leader of a group of Navy SEALs operating off of a carrier near western Africa. During a bloody civil war in Nigeria, Waters' team is called in to extract an Italian doctor (who is a U.S. citizen by marriage) and a priest and two nuns.

After a HALO jump, the team shows up looking all cool with their camo and sweet machine guns.

The soon meet Dr. Lena Kendricks (Monica Bellucci), who is wicked hot and refuses to leave the mission and all of the people under her care.

They convince her to leave and bring along a bunch of the people from the mission who will most assuredly be killed if they stay and wait for the rebels to show up. The priest and the two nuns decide to stay and try to stop the rebels from harming anyone. Smart move.

When the team makes it to their extraction point, they secure the doctor in the helicopter and proceed to leave all of the people from the mission, which obviously pisses her off. En route to the carrier, they fly over the mission and find that it has been destroyed. It is at this point that Waters decides to defy orders and do the right thing, turning the chopper around to protect the people from the mission and get them safely to the Cameroon border.

This is where shit gets cool. The SEALs try and move as quickly as possible but find that the rebels are gaining on them, leading to lots of firefights in the woods and a bunch of real American heroes furthering our country's foreign policy through superior firepower and training.

Some badass highlights of the movie include Cole Hauser setting up explosives and slowing down the rebel force, the whole SEAL team using silenced weapons to take out a squad of dudes "cleansing" a village and the big gun battle at the end where the eight SEALs advance on the hundreds of rebels and mess some shit up. Also jets show up and carpet bomb the shit out of the place.

Now this isn't the greatest movie I have ever seen, but like the title of my blog entry suggests, its one of the most badass. Its a nice action film with some heart to it. You won't cry or anything (like with Armageddon), but dammit you will respect those soldiers for the choices they made.

I know this movie is cool because I have thought about how I totally would have played Tears of the Sun with my friends if I were a kid. Also, I don't know what Tears of the Sun means but that might just be incidental.

I have also learned that there is an extended edition that features 20 extra minutes. I can only presume that contained in this 20 minutes are more gunfights and probably a scene where Dr. Kendricks finds some time to get away from the stress of their pursuit and bathe naked in a waterfall in the Nigerian jungle. That's what I would have added if I were the director.

In summation, Tears of the Sun = badass.