If this is as good as the US Military is, God help us.

Rating: 1/10 (5 August 2002)

And that is what makes BHD a horror movie rather than a war movie really. What we have here is a case of mixed genres. This is not a film about the evils of war, or even really about war itself. Is a propaganda piece for thinking locally and acting locally and horror movie designed to make one paranoid because it turns out that the people who are supposed to be protecting us, are incompetent in all the ways that we usually figure that they would be.
Now, having said that, what makes this movie a particularly bad piece cinematic endeavor is that Scott and company are afraid to allow the force of that insight to shine through. Plenty has been written about the 'Fog of War'--that is, the fact that when the bullets start flying, not only do politics go out the window (regrettably the politics seems to have gone out the window when the film cameras started rolling as well), but so also do the best laid plans and what small levels of good sense there were to begin with. But, you see, Scott hasn't the stomach for that film. So he front-end loads the reasons for the fog of war.
We find out that in the midst of the Delta Force and the Texas Rangers, we have asthmatics and epileptics. I did a little checking, and discovered that asthma and epilepsy (and I don't mean to knock anyone who has either of these ailments--you can live perfectly normals lives with both of them), are generally considered reasons for reassigning soldiers to desk jobs in Ft. Worth, or Laramie.
So what we have is Scott afraid to make a movie about the fact that war goes wrong just because war always goes wrong, and instead making a movie about how war goes wrong because our Special Ops are populated with people who either can't breathe when the going is tough, or having seizures when the going is tough. You see, it makes the world safe again. All we need to worry about is that the next time, we don't send in any asthmatics and we can be sure that the operation will be a tidy success--just like Afghanistan was (with certainly no errant bombs and no mis-information). Once, you have that set-up, that's when the politics really is deplorable--because of the fall back on such idiocies as 'heroism' and just looking our for your friends. I am less interested in heroics than I am interested in people (not just soldiers but them too) thinking about why we are in such places as Somalia in the first place. I'll forgive a movie about the brotherhood between soldiers as long is it seems like those soldiers are aware that they have a place in the wider world, but this is not that movie.