INCITEFUL AND INTUITIVE PEOPLE SHOULD SKIP THIS SECTION

Okay, they're gone. Now I can talk about a dream I had last night. I was in a Chinese restaurant and my fried chicken was nice and crispy on the outside but raw on the inside. I shouldn't have been surprised when the entire kitchen staff left only moments after I placed my order, throwing on jackets and lighting cigarettes on their way out the door. I took the chicken over to the waitress, who was sitting in a booth and watching television (you know, this restaurant was kind of an amalgam of every dingy off-hours Chinese restaurant I've ever sat in). She saw the half-cooked chicken and bowed her head contritely, beginning to nibble at the chicken herself. This was not what I had intended, but in her defense the skin looked really good. Even the interior was a really pretty cross-section of cooked white meat and translucent pink. Something in the back of my mind is telling me that raw chicken in a dream is really bad, but I'm not certain what it is. So for now I'm going to assume that my subconscious is warning me about the dangers of improperly cooked poultry, and I'm going to watch for further dreams about wiping down kitchen counters carefully and such.

I SPENT SUNDAY AFTERNOON IN A DARK ROOM WITH STRANGERS

I watched the new Bruce Willis vehicle Tears of the Sun, and as vehicles go it's an amphibious tank with camouflage covering. Here's a review I submitted to a local print concern.

There is a moment in Antoine Fuqua's allegorical boom-fest of good (American soldiers) and evil (hordes of Nigerian muslims) in which a missionary bids farewell to a group of departing soldiers. "Go with God," he calls, to which Bruce Willis quietly responds: "God left Africa long ago".

What are we to make of a film that features a hero consigning an entire continent to the outer darkness? No wonder, then, that we're treated to two hours of extended wailing and gnashing of teeth, as a small group of U.S. soldiers leads a mission of endangered Christian Africans on an exodus out of the heart of darkness into the safety of a dusty Cameroonian refugee camp. What begins as a passable and even stylish military action flick disintegrates under the weight of its pro-war agenda, until the story degrades into ham-handed allegory and a tearful African woman caps the show by sobbing to Bruce Willis: "God will not forget you, Lieutenant". I agree, but after Tears of the Sun I'm betting God will remember Willis in the same way that the neighbourhood cop remembers the kid who eggs his front door on Halloween.

The premise is strictly high-concept (the working title, Hostile Rescue, pretty much sums it up). A group of U.S. soldiers led by battle-weary Lieutenant A.K. Waters (Bruce Willis) are dropped into hostile Nigerian territory in order to rescue babelicious Dr. Lena Kendricks (Monica Bellucci, equipped with jungle-movie shirt that loses its buttons whenever the script calls on her to run) and a few European missionaries. The mission begins to go awry when the hot-blooded and clearly ungrateful Kendricks demands that 'her people' be rescued as well. Waters agrees, hustling a group of sorrowful Nigerians on a jungle trek to safety. To keep things interesting, a platoon of leather-faced 'rebel troops' pursue the convoy ruthlessly, stopping only to sniff at discarded military gear and execute European priests with machetes.

Along the way, Willis' rocky exterior and bureaucratic training begin to break down, as he witnesses Evil in its purest form. The Evil takes the shape of Muslim soldiers who grimly perform the entire repetoire of ethnic cleansing: murder, torture, rape, mutilation, etc. The moral pivot of the film comes when the soldiers can no longer stand by and witness The Evil, thereby taking their allegorical place as Good. "What about the rules of engagement?" asks a soldier. "We're already engaged," Willis replies. Then they slaughter every soldier in the village, killing with the clean precision of high-velocity sniper bullets and silenced handguns. The Evil didn't even know what hit it.

Once Willis has fully embodied The Good, he adopts a zero-tolerance policy toward The Evil. Rapists get their throats cut, killers are erased with a bullet in the back, informants are shot and left to bleed to death. A crying African (who happens to hold the future of Nigerian democracy in his hands) is told to "Cowboy the fuck up!". In the Hell of Africa, mercy is strained through an iron grate; only a brutal justice will cleanse Hell of its demons, and only Americans are cut out for the job.

Willis and Bellucci do as well as can be expected with the bare bones of character the script affords them. As Waters, Willis doesn't have to do much more than grimace and intone a few monosyllables. He's least convincing when he develops a conscience, but the movie compensates by funneling that conscience into scene after scene of manly bonding and gunfire. As for Bellucci, she spends most of the film switching between two registers: passionate indignation and passionate contrition, which melts into a puddle of passionate gratitude. In the allegorical scheme she stands for those who would compromise and attempt to do good in foreign climes while allowing The Evil to run the country. By the end she has been absorbed Borg-like into The Good, cradling a bloody but unbowed Bruce Willis to her breast.

If the main characters have limited options, the Africans fare even worse, faced with the choice of being long-suffering and exquisitely noble Christians or expressionless Muslims bent on genocide. There's also an African-American soldier in Willis' crew that the film occasionally focuses on. Fuqua seems to want to say something about the black American's relationship to the spectacle of Africans murdering each other, but he doesn't quite know know what it is, so most of the time the character is reduced to looking haunted and increasingly bug-eyed. It's a symptom of the film's ambition to tackle Grand Themes of Life and Death, but it fails miserably because it's hollow at the core.

Eventually The Evil is destroyed by American fighter jets raining down impossibly precise fire on the rebel forces. The Good somehow stumbles to safety, and the audience learns that we're all a lot safer if we let the United States unleash its military on the evildoers of the world.

In truth I was pretty polite to this here shoot-em-in-the-jungle-and-let-em-bleed piece of schlock. This was simplistic crap that started out dumb and swiftly dumbed itself down. There's actually a point at which a big bad black guy picks up a spent military flare,studies it for a moment, and sniffs it. Oh yeah - this butcher in a beret and khakis who brandishes a gun but reserves his machete for whimpering Italian priests is only a hair's breadth away from his African tribal roots, is that it? Even the photography of the nice Africans is distintly documentary style, with quick verite shots intended to capture silent moments of eating, fatigue, whatever. It's as if Fuqua forgot to film them on location and spliced in some old Wild Africa footage of dark contintent savages. Every so often they break out into song, dance, clap - but they do not speak. Their mouthpiece, a woman named Patience (the one who says "God will not forget you"), spends most of her time telling the Americans how good they are for helping out. She even seems to develop a thing for the lone black soldier. Sigh. I feel bad for Malick Bowens, the actor who played the black soldier, consigned to a weird little ghetto of one. The American horror of mixing the races pops up again. Not even the minimal erotic tension between Willis' American soldier and Bellucci's Italian doctor can be consummated - the ranks have pulled that close.

The most laughable moment in the movie comes after we find out that the convoy of refugees contains the murdered president's son, the rightful heir to the head of the Igbo tribe and the only hope of a democratic future in Nigeria. This is why a platoon of very bad men has been tracking them, although what excuse does pure atavistic Evil need? Willis gets on the field radio to his commander (Tom Skeritt, who spends the entire movie standing around on an aircraft carrier) and pleads on behalf of all Nigeria for authorization to take the quasi-refugees to safety. The notion that this character - who has already developed a sense of moral outrage - has now acquired the conscience of an entire nation, is so palpably ridiculous that Willis can barely get the lines out of his mouth.

Wait - that's the second most laughable moment. Even funnier is the missile strike called in on the bad Nigerians. Willis drops a smoke flare and the planes are able to destroy everything on one side of the smoke. All the muslims scream as fire engulfs them, while the Americans lie safely on the other side, protected by a screen of yellow smoke. It's a rare feat for the reigning world champions of friendly fire kills.

I wonder what Americans make of films like this. Certainly we have our share of nobrows and slackjaws who like things blowed up real good, but there are tons of Americans who are against the coming war and dread the thought of U.S. military hegemony pushing around the Middle East and Africa and Southeast Asia and Europe and South America and... well, I guess that's everything (I think Antarctica should have weapons of mass destruction (and if you read some historical accounts, Nazi Germany had some strange stuff going on down there) for Bush and friends to eradicate). What do they think of these blood-soaked versions of Disney cartoons that serve as propaganda for the military?

parode - exode