Oscar Nominated: 'Best Film With Helicopters In'

Rating: Null/10 (14 March 2003)

"When I get home I'm gonna marry that gal o'mine and buy us a little house with a white picket fence"
No-one actually utters that old chestnut, but this film is so cliched that within 5 minutes of it starting I was making bets as to which character would be the unfortunate soul to voice the line. My money was on Ranger Danny Grimes (played in his usual so-so manner by Ewan McGregor) - his somewhat wimpy character simply screamed 'I'm dead by the end of the film, me!', but sadly that wasn't the case. Shame.
After a little, simplistic scene-setting which basically boils down to 'Farrah Aidid = Bad Man' we get to the real meat of the film. And what processed, lumbering, bovine meat it is. Macho soldier cliches are presented to us without the faintest hint of irony - when a soldier tears a plaster cast from his arm it seems almost an homage to the Rambo movies. But they were filmed in the 1980's, and B.H.D was filmed in 2001. Surely things should have progressed in that time? People can't still be buying in to those tired old cliches? Surely...
Our heroes then charge (well, fly) into the city of Mogadishu to seize the leaders of Habr Gidr, the clan under the control of the aforementioned dictator. For reasons that are not made particularly obvious to the simple viewer, this is all done without informing the UN of their intentions, or even their close allies in the campaign, the Pakistani peacekeepers.
What appears to have been a rather sparsely devised Plan A goes smoothly right up until they actually arrive at Mogadishu when chaos theory comes into play and it all falls messily, noisily, to pieces, forcing them to resort to Plan B. What do you mean, there's no Plan B?
"30 minutes in and out" nothing can go wrong, so no need for a Plan B? Oops...
Essentially, what follows is a convoy of trucks trundling around getting shot at quite a bit; hordes of anonymous Somalis scurry around, shooting but mostly getting shot, and there's a whole barrel-full of bad acting thrown in for good measure (stand up Mr. Hartnett). And what lunatic thought of reuniting three members of the cast of that other cinematic historical document Pearl Harbour? As if this film didn't have credibility problems as it was.
This film also displays a startling coldness to the Somali casualties in large part. While it would be insensitive to mock or deride the loss of 19 Americans in this exercise, it is extraordinary that the film refers to these young men as having 'laid down their lives', and yet mentions almost as an incidental that around 1000 Somalis were also 'killed'. No laying down of lives for them then? And as exemplified by one of the better scenes in the film, many Somali combatants were little more than children.
Add to this a scene in which a soldier berates the UN for not being battle-ready when they had not been informed of the operation, and you have a fairly repulsive exercise in jingoism.
If you enjoy cliched, propagandist militarism then this is most definitely the film for you. Otherwise I'd file it under the label 'only if there's nothing better to do'.