Again prompted by David Thomson's The Fatal Alliance: A Century of War on Film, and also the cast: Eric Bana's Hollywood debut, Ewan McGregor and Ewen Bremner, Tom Sizemore (less psycho than usual) and not Josh Hartnett. Sam Shepard does OK too. And so on and on. Directed by Ridley Scott.
The Americans decide to remove a warlord from Mogadishu, Somalia in 1993 (notionally as part of a humanitarian operation to reduce starvation in the greater population) but don't bother informing the United Nations mission before doing so. Things go as it says on the tin. There is something of the second half of Full Metal Jacket — the detailed and graphic reconstruction of ultraviolence in an urban warzone — but it is too often too difficult to follow who's where and why. (Scott misses a trick by not having more detailed maps in the interstitial command scenes back at base.) The dialogue often tends to pure American hokum. And like most Việt Nam flicks, a fair neutral would have to say that the makers of this movie were on the side that lost.
Roger Ebert: four stars. Elvis Mitchell: G. I. Jane but all boys. "As in Pearl Harbor, the battle [...] is an eye-catching misfire, color-coordinated down to the tracer rounds." "Top Gun on an all-protein diet." Groundhog Day. Ouch. So characterless and racially segregated it plays like a zombie movie.
