director
Ridley
Scott
screenwriter
Ken Nolan
based
on the book by
Mark Bowden
producers
Ridley Scott
Jerry Bruckheimer
cinematographer
Slavomir Idziak
music
Hans Zimmer
editor
Pietro Scalia
cast
Josh Hartnett (Eversmann)
Ewan McGregor (Grimes)
Tom Sizemore (McKnight)
William Fichtner (Howe)
Eric Bana (Hooten)
Ewen Bremner (Nelson)
Sam Shepard (Major General Garrison)
Jeremy Piven (Wolcott)
Ron Eldard (Durant)
Orlando Bloom (Blackburn)
Brendan Sexton III (Kowalewski)
mpaa rating: R
running
time: 143m
u.s.
release: 12/28/01
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
official
website
other ridley
scott films
reviewed on this website:
- g.i.
jane
- gladiator
- hannibal
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Perhaps because we are at war,
the visceral combat movie Black Hawk Down has gotten a
bit of a free ride from many critics. Let this be a roadblock,
if a small one. The film takes a relatively recent true war story
-- the disastrous 1993 military effort in Somalia -- and strips
it down for action. It's as if a slasher film had half an hour
of sketchy character set-up, then devoted two straight hours
to nothing but kill, kill, kill. There's a certain purity to
it, but past a certain point it's just Ridley Scott playing toy
soldiers.
Scott, you may recall, was
once a real director -- gifting the science-fiction genre with
two of its finest ornaments, Alien and Blade Runner,
and doing a solid job of work on Thelma & Louise that
amounted to staying out of the way of Callie Khouri's excellent
script. Last year's Hannibal
was a comeback of sorts for him -- the movie was his to screw
up, and he didn't -- but otherwise he has collapsed into the
mannerisms of his brother Tony, burying simple stories in pompous
gritty style, and Black Hawk Down is the grittiest yet.
The movie isn't a militaristic joke like Scott's 1997 G.I. Jane, but it's on about the same
dramatic level.
Screenwriter Ken Nolan's paring
down of Mark Bowden's acclaimed book reduces the soldiers to
ciphers carrying only the most functional of dialogue (and not
always the most functional of weaponry). As one Black Hawk helicopter
goes down, and then another, and the soldiers try to carry out
frantic rescue missions while flattened by Somali fire, the movie's
businesslike relentlessness gets oppressive and exhausting --
which, I suppose, is true to the actual experience, but it would've
been nice to get to know a few of the men we're meant to care
about.
Here, for instance, is Josh
Hartnett, who still looks like a high-school senior but is unaccountably
getting war-hero roles in movies like this and Pearl
Harbor. Whenever the camera's on him, he purses his lips
and looks grim. Let's move on to two Trainspotting
alumni, Ewan McGregor and Ewen Bremner, who manage to sneak some
spark into their roles (a desk jockey who's sort of eager
to get into combat and a bug-eyed, deafened soldier, respectively).
Then there's Tom Sizemore, who's going to be typecast as the
Reliable Potato-Shaped Grunt for the rest of his life if he isn't
careful; and quirky talents like Ron Eldard and Jeremy Piven,
thrown away as chopper pilots; and poor Orlando Bloom, last seen
ventilating Orcs in The Fellowship
of the Ring, now seen as a wet-nosed private whose mishap
sets the whole rotten tragedy of errors in motion.
Hartnett, Bremner and Sizemore
were also in Pearl Harbor, which like Black Hawk Down
was produced by Jerry Bruckheimer (both films also pretentiously
lack a studio logo at the beginning, as if the movies were too
important for that). Bruckheimer seems to be taking it upon himself
to be the trash Thucydides of the new millennium, the chronicler
of American catastrophe; he's even been warily suggesting that
he might be interested in a film about the 9/11 attacks, and
such a film, if nothing else, might make an ideal companion DVD
along with Pearl Harbor and Black Hawk Down in
the inevitable "Americans Under Fire" boxed set.
How is Black Hawk Down
as a pure combat movie? Sometimes tight -- Scott gets a lot of
mileage out of rocket launchers -- but eventually monotonous,
with the time-honored badly wounded soldier choking out a request
to tell his parents he fought hard, and his buddy's time-honored
reassuring response, "You can tell 'em yourself." There
are a few fake-outs, such as when a downed pilot makes sure to
linger over a pocket photo of his wife and kids before he's overtaken
by a crowd of enemy soldiers and then ... isn't killed.
Indeed, the characters' chances of survival increase or decrease
according to their audience-recognition factor; the guys from
Pearl Harbor and the guy from Moulin
Rouge will most likely make it out okay, but the eighteen
Americans who died on Somalian soil are mainly played by unknowns.
The fallen soldiers are listed before the end credits, not that
we know them any better now than we did before the movie started.
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