There are many Bruce Willis movies on Netflix, but none of them are particularly good, which rather fittingly sums up the actor’s career at large over the last decade or so. However, he’s still got that residual A-list status, so subscribers will always be prone to checking out his latest addition to the library, even if they regret it immediately afterward.
The latest Willis dud to find a new lease of life on the platform is Tears of the Sun, the military action thriller that flopped at the box office back in 2003 after earning just $86 million on a $100 million budget. Perhaps the single most interesting thing about the film is that it got its title from an early Die Hard 4 moniker because there’s not much else to recommend.
Willis is on familiar turf as a veteran soldier leading a team on a rescue mission deep into the dangerous and deadly Nigerian jungles. When their target refuses to abandon the people she’s helping, the squad is forced to dig in and lead an entire camp of refugees to safety. Antoine Fuqua is a very inconsistent director, and Tears of the Sun was definitely one of his misses.
However, it currently ranks as the tenth most-watched title on Netflix in the United States, because sometimes people just want to watch a proven action hero shoot bad guys. Tears of the Sun aims for depth but abandons it in favor of pyrotechnics pretty quickly, but a 69% audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes would indicate that a lot of people enjoyed it nonetheless.
