Black Hawk Down (*1/2)
review by Jon Waterman

Why does Ridley Scott bother to make movies anymore?  Wait, here’s a better question:  Why do I keep going to see Ridley Scott movies?  I guess I’m just hoping to see another modern classic, such as “Blade Runner” or “Alien.”  Instead I’m subjected to watching another two and a half mind-numbing hours of the same old formulaic, quasi-emotional gore fest that has become the war movie.

This film takes place in 1993 during the United States’ intervention of the civil strife in Somalia.  White titles superimposed over a scrolling shot of corpses with open eyes gives the viewer an early indication of the forced tone of the picture.  The US devises a plan to take many high-powered renegades prisoner, thus hoping to get them closer to their true mission—the capture/assassination of Mohamed Farrah Aidid.  However, something goes wrong as one of the American Black Hawk helicopters is shot down.  The small group of soldiers must now switch their focus to the crash so that “no man is left behind.”

Throughout the film, the audience is subjected to the standard set of visuals.  Even though all the cinematography techniques for shooting a war movie (graininess of the image, muted set of colors, extreme close-ups, etc.) are new, they are already overused and boring.  The movie didn’t look stylized, it looked like it was just copying movies like “Saving Private Ryan,” “Three Kings,” and even “Behind Enemy Lines.”  Oh, and by the way, when I’m watching a movie for more than two hours, I’d prefer not to see only dust and debris for fifteen minutes.

You already know the plot, but what about the screenplay?  Ken Nolan and Steve Zaillian collaborated on the script.  It boggles the mind as to how the writer of “Schindler’s List” could let such horribly basic and tired dialogue go through.  The script is written in such a way that the whole picture becomes meaningless thanks to the last ten minutes of dialogue.  They also wrote in strange scenes that carried no weight, but for some reason, the audience was supposed to care.

For instance, after one of the helicopters gets shot down, we are brought back to the base where we encounter a new character named Thomas.  For around five minutes we sit with Thomas as he makes a decision as to whether or not to go in and fight (once again through dull dialogue).  Does he go in or not?  Who cares?  We don’t know this guy.  We never see him again.  He carries no particular significance to the furthering of the story.  If this one guy happened to be the hero of the story who pulls of some heroics to get everyone home, I’d accept his story as another element of the formula.  As Thomas stands, he means nothing more than time ticking away in a movie theater.

The film contains little merit.  The acting screamed “B-movie” everywhere, except for Ewan McGregor and Jeremy Piven who know how to work around bad writing.  All of the phoned-in performances almost made me enjoy the dreadful continuous switching of focus.  With so many subplots floating around, there was little time (even in a 2+ hour movie) to linger on one particular star.  Whatever. The less time Josh Hartnett spends on screen the better.

If you’re out there looking for a big action flick with lots of guns and gore and explosions, then I guess you could watch ”Black Hawk Down.”  However, you’ll discover nothing new, nothing exciting, nothing suspenseful and nothing particularly interesting.

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