New Movies: Dark of the Sun

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The Congolese army sergeant is up tight. "To you, this is just a piece of real estate called the Congo," he snarls at his boss, a commander of mercenaries. "But to me it's our Bunker Hill."

Bunker Hill? He is talking about the Simba rebellion of 1964, which was far bloodier and more basic than any fight in the vicinity of Boston. This film spills plenty of blood, but it turns the Congo's victims into plastic participants in a war that is not quite real. The commander (Rod Taylor) and the sergeant (Jim Brown) are at the head of a small band of mercenaries and Congolese troops. Their assignment is to rescue an outpost of helpless whites. Even before the battle begins, however, Brown is forced to restrain Taylor from murdering a murder-bent former Nazi officer. The prize of the battle, once it is joined, is blonde Yvette Mimieux, a sympathetic siren who turns Taylor on by a combination of concupiscence and conscience.

As an adventure story, Dark of the Sun is a workmanlike display worthy of a Ph.D. in demolition warfare. As a vignette of the Simba rebellion, which it purports to be, it is arrant nonsense. The Congolese national army, which it depicts as heroic, was in fact undisciplined and corrupt. The Simba rebels, portrayed as raping terrorists, were in fact relatively disciplined. Held in thrall by a powerful black dawa (magic), the Simbas were forbidden to steal from the whites or even lay hands on a white woman—whose touch, they believed, was evil.

In their excursion for diamonds, moreover, the cinematic mercenaries headed in the wrong direction. The Congo's chief source of diamonds is South Kasai province, which the real-life Simbas never attacked. Thrilling as it is under the suspension of disbelief, Dark of the Sun would have been a much brighter movie had it not pretended to mirror fact.