I fancy a night at the Moulin Rouge

Fact based war story with plenty of gore but a sense of having all been done before.

Nigel Bell

Following hard on the heels of Behind Enemy Lines, here's another action movie with the Americans fighting against the odds to retrieve a nightmare situation.

The plot
It's October 1993 and more than a hundred special force US soldiers begin a smash and grab raid on the market place in Mogadishu, Somalia. The aim is to "extract" two senior advisors to the local warlord. The entire operation should take under an hour.

Place your bets. Which helicopter is going to get shot down?

Things start to go wrong when the Black Hawk of the title (a helicopter) is shot down.

The force has to split up, heading across town to check for helicopter survivors and destroy the craft.

Confusion is intensified when the convoy returning the prisoners to the US base becomes lost in Mogadishu.

Supporters of the warlord come out in force and the soldiers have to fight a rearguard action while awaiting reinforcements from the United nations to come to their rescue.

The verdict
There's no doubt Black Hawk Down is highly polished, action packed and everything you'd want in a modern war film.

The easy way to fight a war. General William Garrison (Sam Shepard) sits back while his troops are shot up

Reality is played out in gory, bloody detail. However, if you watched the BBC television series Band of Brothers, you've seen this all before.

Black Hawk Down is Band of Brothers transferred from World War Two to civil war in East Africa.

It uses similar hand held, in your face action footage.

But like Brothers, it has a problem with a cast that's too large and who you have little feeling for.

For me, only Ewan McGregor and Ewan Bremner (of Trainspotting fame) were names that immediately sprang out from the cast list.

The rest all looked the same, even more so once they put on their helmets.

Unlike Band of Brothers, you didn't have 10 episodes to get to know the cast more fully.

So you didn't really care when a soldier got killed, you simply moved onto the rest of the force and looked out for the two Ewan's.

Post September 11th the message of the film has probably also altered. Certainly the question of why America should be involved in a civil war in Africa is never fully broached.

Only briefly do you get the soldier's view and that of the African militia.

That said, if it's action you want, then after the first 30 minutes of scene and character setting, Black Hawk Down delivers a none-stop rollercoaster of guns, rockets, blood and death.