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'DOWN' TIME: GRIPPING DEPICTION OF ILL-FATED U.S. MISSION IN SOMALIA
BLACK HAWK DOWN: Powerful, realistic but ultimately unsatisfying depiction of urban combat
The New York Post, December 28, 2001

Ridley Scott's "Black Hawk Down" is a beautifully filmed, scrupulously authentic but strangely evasive exercise in combat ultra-realism.

A movie that depicts the tragic and costly mission that prompted the U.S. departure from Somalia, (and discouraged the altruistic use of American force for almost a decade), it gives you a wonderfully vivid sense of what it might have been like to have been under fire in a Mogadishu alleyway in 1993.

There's not a thing in it - from the dogs in the dusty streets to the tactics and equipment on display - that doesn't ring true, thanks to a corps of military advisers that included veterans of the Somalia episode.

Before dropping you into a long battle sequence that sometimes feels like a military version of John Carpenter's "Assault on Precinct 13" or a video primer on the dos and don'ts of urban warfare (do bring maps, spare ammunition and water, even on a brief raid, in case things don't go as planned), director Scott introduces you briefly to a bunch of U.S. Army Rangers and Delta Force commandos at a base in Mogadishu.

They are played by a cast heavy with relative newcomers, including several young actors better known in Australia (Eric Bana) or Great Britain (Ioan Gruffudd, Orlando Bloom). Even the better-known are hard to recognize under their buzz cuts and in their (scrupulously accurate) uniforms, especially once their faces become streaked with dust and blood.

As well as Josh Hartnett, who essentially is the star of the film, I could generally make out Ewan MacGregor, Tom Sizemore, Jason Isaacs ("The Patriot"), William Fichtner ("Go"), performance artist Danny Hoch and of course Sam Shepherd as Gen. William Harrison, the architect of the ill-fated mission - but not Ron Eldard or Jeremy Piven.

Their mission is to capture two key lieutenants of a Somali warlord at a house in an area controlled by his heavily armed clansmen.

Seventy-five Rangers are to go in by helicopter to secure the area while 40 Delta troops storm the house, extract the targets, then bring them to a waiting convoy of humvees.

But first one helicopter and then another are shot down and thousands of angry armed civilians swarm the area, as the Rangers try to rescue their comrades from the crash sites and get out with the wounded.

The ensuing battle lasts through the night and involves a confusing series of attempted rescues and escapes by road and air.

Unlike the book by Mark Bowden, "Black Hawk Down" doesn't try to explain why things went wrong (you get a vague sense of inadequate planning and preparation). Nor does it take a stand on the implications of this operation or the U.S. presence in Somalia - apart from a couple of conversations in which Somalis tell Americans that they have no business interfering in a country they know nothing about.

This is surprising, because the "Black Hawk Down" battle raises questions that are at least as interesting as the difficulty of intense urban warfare in a hostile Third World city, the film's main focus.

Not least among these is how the operation came to be deemed a disastrous defeat when (as the film makes clear) it was in fact an astonishing feat of American military prowess, analogous in many ways to the battle of Rourke's Drift depicted in the 1964 film "Zulu."

Yes, 19 of the massively outnumbered Americans lost their lives after the initial plan fell apart, but they killed at least 1,000 Somali hostiles and achieved their objective.

Combine this odd incuriosity with the decision to spread attention on a confusing ensemble of similar-looking and -sounding soldiers, and you have a film that manages to be hypnotically fascinating and tediously repetitive at the same time.

It doesn't help that you often can't hear what little dialogue there is in the sometimes crude script credited to Ken Nolan and Steve Zaillian.

Or that you witness the skill and bravery of the American soldiers (many of the casualties were a direct result of the Rangers' insistence on leaving no one behind) without benefit of context, or in ways that deprive their actions of logic.

At least the book included maps, so you could tell where the Americans were pinned down or how far they were from the downed helicopters.