Same Old Bruckheimer, masquerading as a great movie maker

Rating: Null/10 (30 December 2001)

SPOILERS Ridley Scott's noisy, pointless war epic Black Hawk Down is an interminable mural of killing, famine, bleeding and devastation that tries to outdo Saving Private Ryan without the creative genius or historic magnitude that made that film an instant classic. Based on a massacre during the war in Somalia in which a troop of U.S. soldiers and two crashed helicopter crews fought for survival while trapped behind enemy lines for 15 hours and surrounded by armies of hostile savages, the film examines the grit and heroism of boys waiting to be rescued after an idiotic military blunder. Josh Hartnett, Ewan McGregor, Tom Sizemore and Sam Shepard are some of the actors lost in the carnage and gore. They are fine, but so what? Limbs explode, guts spill and blood splatters in an endurance test that is numbing, but nothing new. In war, there are a thousand ways to die. Ridley Scott deserves no medals for forcing us to suffer through EVERY single one.