Between this and Spy Game I’m not sure which one is the good Scott brother anymore.
Black Hawk Down plays like a picture hamstrung by an earnest desire to tell the truth and nothing but the truth while still trying to be a crowd-pleasing combat picture. This split-focused wrong-headedness grinds the movie to a halt and while there’s much kinetic action on the screen there is almost no dramatic action.
The picture involves a government sanctioned kidnapping mission gone wrong and the ensuing chaos. As far as separating characters from one another that’s a whole different can of worms.
The closest thing to a protagonist one can find is Ranger Staff Sergeant Matt Eversmann (Josh Hartnett). The fact that he is young, conflicted on the mission, and newly promoted are all firmly established and readily dropped as unimportant once the shooting starts. A character actually says that everything goes out the window once the lead starts to fly and unfortunately that seems to include filmmaking and storytelling.
Also in the greenhorn seat is Company Clerk John Grimes (Ewan McGregor). Grimes leaves his desk position to get shot at for the first time on this mission. Both characters have at least a shred of personality when we meet them but once they suit up and hit the dirt they may as well be any two ducking and shooting bodies.
Hartnett is once again poorly cast as the golden boy leader that Hollywood seems to want to make him, while McGregor abandons all of the charisma and style that has made him a star in order to play the dull keyboard jockey. On the other hand, Eric Bana plays an ultimate combat bad ass with credibility and Tom Sizemore plays the same character he’s played so well in war picture after war picture making me wish that he would star in The Aldo Ray Story.
The film’s main weakness stems from a refusal to attach us to one character and try to bring us into the action through that soldier’s eyes. The camera is detached from the action and the plot and so are we. One might be tempted to apologize for this semi-documentary feel as an attempt to stay close to the facts of the true story and not “Hollywoodize” the material. If this is Ridley Scott’s intention then why include a comedic subplot involving two none too bright heavy artillery men left behind and their “what did you say?” hijinks? It’s a distraction that almost seems like left over footage from Three Kings.
The lack of any kind of plot involving characters we care about or even know makes what seems like it could be first-rate combat picture infuriating. Plot comes from character, but we have no plot, only a situation, a set-up with no rising action, climax or conclusion.
Scott abandons any character development or even any characters of any kind. Except for Bana and Sizemore, all the characters are interchangeable. It seems that the film has taken the militaristic nature of the story so much to heart that, just as in a well-trained army, any one soldier could just as well be any other soldier.
This “uniformity of a good soldier” argument gets undermined by the way that Bana’s loner, plays-by-his-own-rules character of Delta Sergeant 1st Class “Hoot” Gibson is pitched as the super-soldier with all the answers. We know he has all the answers because he gives them to us at chow before heading back into combat.
Characters run and shoot for about 95% of the movie for the other 5% of the time they deliver overwritten speeches about how they feel. There are some interesting visual moments but it’s still unclear what actually happened. This picture is by no means as bad as Behind Enemy Lines or Pearl Harbor, but it’s not even Three Kings, much less Saving Private Ryan.
