Black Hawk Down

By EWAN McDONALD

(Herald rating: * * * )

Here, as they say in Movieland, is the set-up: in Mogadishu, Somalia, in October 1993, a US military raid went disastrously wrong when the plan ran into unexpected resistance. Eighteen Americans lost their lives, 70 more were wounded in America's worst day in combat since the Vietnam War, and days later President Clinton pulled out the troops.

The American spin is that the troops were on a humanitarian mission to deliver UN food shipments and that 300,000 Somalis died of starvation because local warlords were more interested in protecting their turf than feeding their people.

The more unkind world view was then, and is now, that the Americans were on an imperial adventure and got their backsides kicked back to Washington. This sort of thought is far beyond Black Hawk Down director Ridley Scott and producer Jerry Bruckheimer. Fresh from telling how Pearl Harbor was conceived and executed by the Japanese High Command to stop two Americans chasing the same English nurse, they reduce the world and its workings to a simplistic bang-bang shoot-em-up with expensive toys.

It begins when Major General William F. Garrison (Sam Shepard) explains that intelligence has discovered where and when the warlord Mohamed Farrah Aidid's lieutenants will meet. Airborne US troops will drop down on ropes, be joined by ground forces and capture two of Aidid's aides.

The leading cut-outs are Josh Hartnett from Pearl Harbor as the gung-ho sergeant; Ewan McGregor as the reluctant offsider; and Tom Sizemore as the wise old veteran who mentors younger troops.

The raid went pear-shaped which gives Bruckheimer and Scott plenty of opportunity for firefights, helicopter crashes and scattering body parts round the screen.

Of course, they have to airbrush a few inconvenient facts. Even US movie critics attacked the film, its lack of a moral code or respect for the locals. The real US troops were alleged to have shot women and children during their mission. Then there's McGregor's war hero: it's conveniently overlooked that he is now serving a 30-year prison sentence for the rape of a 12-year-old girl.

"It's only a movie," you may say, but that is Hollywood's ultimate triumph. The world, past and present history and events, are just a movie. And so long as the Stars and Stripes wave at the end, all's well.

Rental video, DVD: Today

• DVD features: movie (143min); limited special features including two theatrical trailers; filmographies; On The Set feature.