Graphic action carries ‘Black Hawk Down’

Geoff Carter

Friday, Jan. 18, 2002 | 9:36 a.m.

"Why aren't you shooting?" a soldier demands of another early in "Black Hawk Down," a Ridley Scott film based on Mark Bowden's account of the U.S. military's October 1993 insertion into Somalia. "We're not being shot at yet," his comrade-in-arms replies. The soldier looks at the carnage around him and asks, "How can you tell?"

In another war film, that retort might have stood alone. But the punishing verisimilitude of "Black Hawk Down" doesn't allow for many (read: any) laughs, and the soldier answers the question: "You listen for a hiss near you." No sooner has he said it does the telltale hiss come, and he begins firing. He continues shooting for 24 hours.

"Black Hawk Down" tells the story of a defeat. Over the course of a day, 19 American soldiers were killed in the Bakara Market of Mogadishu, and another 73 were wounded. It was the most calamitous U.S. combat rout since Vietnam. Scott's film of the battle -- produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, who must view this project as atonement or community service -- forsakes politics and posturing and literally drops the audience into the fight, and leaves it there.

At least you're in good company. Josh Hartnett plays the idealistic Sgt. Eversmann, the closest thing "Black Hawk Down" has to a moral compass. He truly believes he can help the "skinnies" (whether the film is racially insensitive is fast becoming a point of criticism), and proves as dependable to the audience as he does to his men.

Fighting with him is a desk jockey and coffee freak (Ewan McGregor), a pair of world-weary, savvy careerists (Tom Sizemore and William Fichtner) and a large ensemble of others just trying to do their jobs, as actors and "soldiers" alike.

That workingman's ethic is "Black Hawk Down's" greatest strength and detriment: I don't think I've ever seen a film that's so much about the business of war, without giving thought to the politics that drive it. The invading force is all about getting out alive; Eversmann's ideals are quickly forgotten in some of the most harrowing combat footage you'll ever see. One fighter dumbly tries to reaffix his thumb; another spots a friend's hand on the ground, and matter-of-factly drops it in his pocket.

Technically, Scott seldom puts a foot wrong. The slick elements of the film's prologue -- monochrome footage of the homefront, graceful helicopter shots straight out of "Apocalypse Now" -- are quickly forgotten as soon as Scott places you in the Bakara Market. He changes perspectives as if he were a news crew with unlimited access -- from on-the-street coverage, to helicopter shots, to the Joint Operations Center, where Major General William Garrison (Sam Shepard) watches -- directs? -- the action.

Narratively, however, "Black Hawk Down" drifts. Scott makes only the most halfhearted of efforts to explain the enemy's motivations; an interrogation scene is as unfulfilling as it is cliched. Scott seems content with the pat summations of two soldiers, both seemingly drawn from Hollywood lore.

Sizemore's character calls the Bakara Market "the Wild West," and indeed it is, complete with a faceless, feral enemy pulled directly from a 1950s western. And later, as another soldier readies himself to go back into the hell he had just barely escaped, he evokes John Wayne: "It's about the men next to you. And that's it."

For a soldier in battle that's doubtlessly true, and it's hardly his fault that Scott doesn't build much context around him. "Black Hawk Down" is about the job, nothing more. The film's shortfalls -- that we never understand quite what the United States was doing in Somalia, or why our government didn't achieve its objectives -- are a burden that its audience, perhaps rightfully, has to shoulder on its own.