This movie was recommended to me by my video clerk, and I will now do my utmost to get him fired. It is a terrible movie. And I’m not even talking about the terrible script, terrible direction, terrible acting – pretty bad editing too.

What’s wrong with? God, where to start. Okay, let’s start with how flat it is. All through watching it I was waiting for development. Character development. Story development. Plot development. Any development at all.

But no.

Willis plays his character, probably intended to be a suffering, traumatized soldier torn between duty and humanity, by frowning a lot and looking threateningly into the middle distance, while collecting more and more dirt, blood and wounds in the best Die Hard fashion.

Monica Belluci does her character, who I can guess from the setting is supposed to be a kind of medical missionary with a good heart and a cynical mind, by making meaningful faces and cursing in Spanish.

Since the things these to say to each other grow more friendly as the movie progresses, I’m also guessing there is supposed to be some warming up of their acquaintance. But their interaction starts out wooden and unconvincing, and remains so throughout 115 minutes of boredom, with the embrace at about 20 minutes as the wince-inducing low.

There’s violence and gore, and lots of it. Now I don’t mind violence and gore; quite the contrary. But here, where it serves only to shout the message that the bad guys are really, really evil and the good guys thus really, really good, it misses the point entirely. Give me *some* ambivalence, please!

Then, at about two-thirds, as if to dash the little remaining hope the movie will amount to anything, there’s a bad, bad scene where the son of the murdered president gets to do a kind of motivational speech. While not quite as horrible as the Emperor’s speech at the end of The Last Samurai, it does a good job of trying to top that one. And 20 minutes later, just when I thought I’d left my empathic embarassment about the speech scene behind me, there’s the moment when the refugees are rescued and they start cheering President Jr., and everybody tells everyone else they love them. All that was lacking was a big group hug and some soft-focus. Bwerk!

But the worst really was that the movie has no merit at all. No matter how hard I wished it to be different, the movie remained either a pointless and offensively imperialistic and racist pamphlet of ‘good’ vs ‘evil’, or a shamelessly overt Bruce Willis worship vehicle.

The video store clerk will have to go.