Both Overpowering and Dull

Rating: 4/10 (23 January 2002)

Black Hawk Down is a cinematic reconstruction of the events that took place in Mogadishu in Somalia in 1993. Civil war was destroying the country and the chief warlord, using hunger as a weapon, intercepted international food supplies and starved 300,000 people to death.
The film starts well, although there are a lot of cue cards to get through which describe the situation in Somalia. The first 30-40 minutes of the film set the scene for a mission to grab the warlord and his cronies from their stronghold in the market area of Mogadishu. But before you know it two Black Hawk choppers have been shot down and the ground troops and Humvee column attempt a rescue. Fighting starts and bullets and RPG's whizz around the theatre, hardly letting up for the next two hours. Somali militia fall to the ground one after the other as they are gunned down by the seemingly invincible US soldiers. Then fatalities start to come in on the US side and things get rather gory in places.
The first half an hour of the movie looks very pretty but fails to set the scene for the conflict or bother with much characterisation, leading me to wonder what purpose it serves. Then when the battle begins the visuals and aurals takes over from the plot. As a film it becomes overpowering, especially in modern cinemas with deafeningly loud sound systems - the action sequences are as intense as the start/end of Saving Private Ryan but barely subside for the remaining two hours.
Speaking of Saving Private Ryan, Black Hawk Down does not compare well. Although over-sentimental in places, SPR shows the army machine working as a whole at the beginning but then builds the characters it introduces so that while the film ends with another bloody battle, you actually care about the soldiers involved. And in the opening scene the counterattack against the Nazi's is so brutal it forces you think about the horrors of war. In contrast, Black Hawk Down is one of those films where you just sit there, spot the "bad guy" and wait for the good guy to blow him away. The Somali's are depicted as idiots with guns who (quoting) "can't shoot for s**t".
I was seriously thinking about walking out half way through and wish I had. I couldn't have cared less about what was going to happen next, and I'd had enough of gunfight after gunfight. It simply becomes tiresome. And I like action movies.
Still the action was well filmed throughout, as you'd expect from Scott. The sound of the fast-firing machine guns on the helicopters was particularly impressive. We all know what handheld machine-guns sound like, but these were like buzzsaws. Terrifying.
5/10. The worst Ridley Scott film I've seen (and almost the worst Bruckheimer film too for that matter, but Pearl Harbor wins that contest for the sickeningly sentimental ending).