I fancy a night
at the Moulin Rouge
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Fact based
war story with plenty of gore but a sense of having all been done
before.
Nigel Bell
Following hard
on the heels of Behind Enemy Lines, here's another action
movie with the Americans fighting against the odds to retrieve a
nightmare situation.
The plot
It's October 1993 and more than a hundred special force US soldiers
begin a smash and grab raid on the market place in Mogadishu, Somalia.
The aim is to "extract" two senior advisors to the local
warlord. The entire operation should take under an hour.
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| Place your
bets. Which helicopter is going to get shot down? |
Things start
to go wrong when the Black Hawk of the title (a helicopter) is shot
down.
The force has
to split up, heading across town to check for helicopter survivors
and destroy the craft.
Confusion is
intensified when the convoy returning the prisoners to the US base
becomes lost in Mogadishu.
Supporters of
the warlord come out in force and the soldiers have to fight a rearguard
action while awaiting reinforcements from the United nations to
come to their rescue.
The verdict
There's no doubt Black Hawk Down is highly polished,
action packed and everything you'd want in a modern war film.
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| The easy
way to fight a war. General William Garrison (Sam Shepard) sits
back while his troops are shot up |
Reality is played
out in gory, bloody detail. However, if you watched the 成人论坛 television
series Band of Brothers, you've seen this all before.
Black Hawk
Down is Band of Brothers transferred from World War Two
to civil war in East Africa.
It uses similar
hand held, in your face action footage.
But like Brothers,
it has a problem with a cast that's too large and who you have little
feeling for.
For me, only
Ewan McGregor and Ewan Bremner (of Trainspotting fame) were names
that immediately sprang out from the cast list.
The rest all
looked the same, even more so once they put on their helmets.
Unlike Band
of Brothers, you didn't have 10 episodes to get to know the
cast more fully.
So you didn't
really care when a soldier got killed, you simply moved onto the
rest of the force and looked out for the two Ewan's.
Post September
11th the message of the film has probably also altered. Certainly
the question of why America should be involved in a civil war in
Africa is never fully broached.
Only briefly
do you get the soldier's view and that of the African militia.
That said, if
it's action you want, then after the first 30 minutes of scene and
character setting, Black Hawk Down delivers a none-stop rollercoaster
of guns, rockets, blood and death.
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