BEFORE: All right, my focus is on movies again, and we've got a big holiday weekend coming up. Can't go anywhere, of course, because everyone else is going somewhere so who wants to sit in traffic going out to some beach on Long Island? Not me. I've got a BBQ & beer event next Saturday, so I'll do my Labor Day cookout celebrating then. I think we've got dinner guests coming over on Saturday, and I've got some leftover clean-up to do from the work we had done at the house, like I've got a couple of framed photos and an art piece that need to be hung on the wall, that's about enough physical labor for one day if I can manage it. I think I'd rather just catch up on some sleep this weekend if I can work that in. Maybe I can refile my August DVDs and pull my September and October discs out for viewing, that's a job.
Tom Skerritt carries over again from "Broke".
THE PLOT: A Special-Ops commander leads his team into the Nigerian jungle to rescue a doctor, who will only join them if they agree to save 70 refugees too.
AFTER: Well, we're starting Labor Day weekend today, Bruce Willis will be here for three days, but let's think about what I've seen so far this week, in terms of jobs. Kevin Hart played a marketing/advertising executive in "72 Hours", that's a job. Andy Garcia played a prison guard who wanted to be an actor, there's two more, then he played a cardiac surgeon in "At Middleton", but we also covered college professors and college staff with that film. I don't remember what Vera Farmiga's character did, I think she made or sold custom furniture or something? Anyway, that's another job.
Then with "Broke" we covered farming AND rodeo riding, that's a wide scope - and now we're on soldiers or maybe Navy SEALS and also doctors who practice medicine in foreign countries, like relief medicine or Doctors without Borders maybe. This is all fine, I've accidentally covered a wide range of professions, all in a week's worth, I really don't want to be focused on any one thing, I'm free-range right now, between major holidays (July 4 & Halloween) so whatever we get for Labor Day, we get. This makes more sense than, say, programming a week's worth of animated features for kids, which could have been ridiculous, at least this last week has been within the realm of possibility with regards to employment, so I can say I planned it that way. I'll get to the cartoons in about a week...
Today's story takes place in Nigeria, after a coup d'etat where an exiled general has overthrown the President, sending the country into chaos and causing a round of ethnic cleansing, which we all know is geo-political speak for "killing the people you don't like", in this case a Muslim dictator killing the Christian Igbo people. I don't know enough about Nigeria's history to determine if this is based on a real incident or something that's likely to happen, or if it's all just fictional. I mean, it's in West Africa and has a lot of different ethnic groups, so anything is possible, but I'm not sure if a situation like this has actually occurred there since the coups that took place in the mid-1960's. They made me study Ancient History and U.S. History in high school, but that only got me so far, and I wasn't required to take history after that, but I chose to take Art History as an elective.
Remember that this film was released in 2003, so if anything, it COULD be based on the aftermath of the coup d'etat of 1993, led by General Sani Abacha, but again, I don't know much about it except for the information that's on Wikipedia. It seems like Abacha was known for looting the country, accepting bribes from oil companies, and having environmentalists arrested and executed. Yeah, those seem like dark times. So sure, this kind of thing could be the reason that the SEAL team tonight gets sent in to exfiltrate the relief doctor, the dictator in charge doesn't want the common people to have access to free medicine at a clinic or something, next thing you know they're going to want to have jobs and the ability to vote freely in multi-party elections, it's a slippery slope after all.
Bruce Willis plays Lt. Waters, the leader of the SEAL team, tasked with getting his team to Dr. Kendricks' clinic and extracting her for her own safety - but what he doesn't count on is her reluctance to leave her patients behind. So he obviously lies to her and says there's room on the helicopters for any refugees willing to walk to the pick-up site, but no, there's just no way. And getting all of those injured people to the extraction location takes much longer than it should have, giving the Nigerian guerrillas a chance to catch up with them over the course of two days. The hike probably could have been just a couple hours if they weren't dragging all those refugees with them!
Waters actually loads Dr. Kendricks on the copter, even though she slapped him HARD when she realized he never meant to save the refugees and lied to her. They were in the copter, flying to the aircraft carrier, but they made the mistake of flying back over her clinic, which they could see was burning down after the Nigerian soldiers got there. Well, duh, this is WHY they wanted to get her out of there. But this leads to a change of plans, Waters makes the copters go back, and they load up the sickest refugees for treatment, and decide to make the longer hike to the Cameroon border with the doctor. I mean, what could POSSIBLY go wrong with this plan? Jeez, I kind of have to call a NITPICK POINT here, why not just load the doctor on the copter with the refugees, because then, mission accomplished, the SEAL team can go fight the rebels and hike to Cameroon without putting the doctor's life at risk any further.
But I get it, Lt. Waters had a crisis of conscience and felt bad about lying to her, so now he's going to put her, himself, and his whole team at risk to do things the harder way. You know, I'll have to give him the benefit of the doubt, because life is crazy sometimes and nobody can see the future, maybe he had a premonition that the helicopters would be shot down by a surface-to-air missile or something. There are no guarantees in the end. And to send her back on the copter he probably would have had to go with her, which would leave his team without a leader, really there's no good way to do this, maybe it's a bit like that puzzle with the fox and the chicken and the cabbage but you can only take two of them in the boat across the river at a time.
The team heads back to the compound and takes down all of the rebels who are still there, and in the process of slaughtering patients and Christians and, well, everybody they can find. Because when all you have is a hammer, everybody looks like a nail. But the American soldiers snipe as many as they can and then kill the rest up close, so things seem to be going well at first. But of course, once they're on the road to Cameroon, the rebels start following them, almost as if one of the refugees has some kind of tracking device or something. And one does, that's when Walters realizes that another one of the refugees is somebody important, the son of the overthrown President, and the last in his bloodline, the only person with a legitimate claim to lead the Ibo nation. Ah, Walters couldn't have seen this one coming, but maybe on some level he knew what he was doing?
There's no time to speculate as the rebels catch up with the American military, who act as a rear guard while the refugees and the doctor head for the border. Waters calls in an airstrike from the aircraft carrier, which takes care of the rebels but a number of the SEAL team members are lost. And somehow the Navy commander from the carrier is there in Cameroon to welcome Waters and the doctor to safety, but was it worth the cost? Did Waters do the wrong thing for the right reasons, or was it the other way around? Who can say in the end? That really depends on what the doctor and the son of the ex-president manage to accomplish in the future, I guess. The question is pretty complicated but I suppose sometimes in life the questions really are like that.
Directed by Antoine Fuqua (director of "The Equalizer 3" and "Shooter")
Also starring Bruce Willis (last seen in "Tom Hanks: The Nomad"), Monica Bellucci (last seen in "Memory"), Cole Hauser (last seen in "School Ties"), Eamonn Walker (last seen in "The Company Men"), Johnny Messner (last seen in "Cosmic Sin"), Nick Chinlund (last seen in "Eraser"), Charles Ingram, Paul Francis, Chad Smith (last seen in "The Package"), Malick Bowens (last seen in "When We Were Kings"), Awaovieyi Agie, Akosua Busia (last seen in "The Color Purple"), Hadar Busia-Singleton, Ida Onyango, Fabrice Yahve Habimana Jr., Sammi Rotibi (last seen in "57 Seconds"), Benjamin A. Onyango, Jimmy Jean-Louis (last seen in "Monster-in-Law"), Fionnula Flanagan (last seen in "The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes"), Cornelia Hayes O'Herlihy, Pierrino Mascarino, Peter Mensah (last seen in "Gladiator II"), Howard Mungo (last seen in "Superhero Movie"), Kanayo Chiemelu, Nkeonye Nwankwo, Alpha Osman Davies, Rodney Charles, Harry Van Gorkum (last seen in "Agent Cody Banks"), Bourke Floyd (last seen in "Babylon"), Amelia Mbaye
RATING: 5 out of 10 smoke bombs (of various colors)
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