Shallow execution makes for mere sensationalism

Rating: 5/10 (19 January 2002)

If you're going to make a movie that's basically two straight hours of combat, there's lots of different ways to make it stay interesting. You can show the political forces at work or the simple tactics that make the events unfold, or otherwise give the audience an overview of what's happening on a larger scale to give the smaller events meaning. Think Three Kings. Or you can divide the action into several set pieces of different types of battle to keep the action fresh. Private Ryan. Or you can make the characters people that you care about and let them arc or at least play off eachother in interesting ways. Or you can make the action so visceral that the audience feels like they're going through the events themselves, hoping that the experience is fascinating or harrowing enough to be the point of the film. Or hopefully, like any good war movie, you put a bunch of these things together.
Black Hawk Down does none of these things. It gives you "characters" who are all boring interchangeable "hero" archetypes with no backstory and are even harder to tell apart for all looking the same. That would be fine, but then it puts them in a maze of streets and rubble, without a sense of where they're trying to go and what they're facing against, shooting in every direction at "bad guys" who pop up in random places at random times, for the whole movie. There's no sense of how far they are from their targets, how far the teams are from eachother, or even how far the army base is from the action when it's time to refuel and rearm. (Some long shots is all I ask.) The action is pretty visceral, but the perspective jumps between the different teams so much that you never get any sense of how long someone has been traveling or waiting, no elation when someone finds their objective, and it's even confusing what most people's objectives are or what direction they're heading.
I guess it can be argued that that's exactly the nature of being thrust into urban combat and having everything go wrong, and that the movie in fact does a good job of keeping the events straight, but if you ask me it's just a lengthy two-plus hours of Bruckheimer-driven sensationalism. It would be a complete disaster if not for Ridley Scott's technical skill keeping it watchable. But I spent nearly the whole film thinking about how many ways it could have been much better.