Forgotten Bruce Willis 'masterpiece' leaves Netflix viewers in tears

Netflix viewers are praising a Bruce Willis movie as a 'masterpiece', though it's entirely possible you've never even heard of it.

While you'll most likely know him from the Die Hard series and several other iconic movies such as The Fifth Element and The Sixth Sense, there's plenty of films he's done which have likely slipped your notice.

Fortunately, plenty of films get a second life when the massed hordes of Netflix subscribers stumble upon them and realise that between bouts of watching the same few sitcoms on repeats, there's a chance to unearth a real gem of a movie.

Columbia Pictures

The latest film to get this treatment is a movie starring Bruce Willis and helmed by Training Day director Antoine Fuqua that released in 2003.

This is Tears of the Sun, in which Willis plays a US Navy SEAL tasked with rescuing a doctor (Monica Bellucci) from a version of Nigeria torn apart by conflict.

Only when he catches up to her and declares he's going to get her out of danger she won't go with him, refusing to leave her patients.

The rest of the plot we'll leave up to you to discover by watching the movie on Netflix, and those who've already done so have been giving their verdict on the film.

One viewer called it the 'best movie he ever made besides Armageddon', which is quite some piece of praise considering Bruce Willis was the lead of frigging Die Hard.

Someone else said watching it was a 'very emotional' experience, so don't go in expecting your bog-standard action fare and nothing else.

Other fans of the movie bickered over the best version of Tears of the Sun, with some thinking an extended version released on DVD in 2005 was the superior edition while others thought the original theatrical cut was a 'much better experience'.

Tears of the Sun ended up being a rather critically divisive film when it released, as the film carries a 34 percent rating from 155 critic reviews but CinemaScore audiences gave the movie an A- grade and Roger Ebert gave it a positive verdict.

Columbia Pictures

Given that some viewers reckon it's a 'masterpiece' and others have said Tears of the Sun brought them out in actual tears this really does sound like one to watch for yourself and figure out.

Meanwhile, film director Fuqua once told Aint It Cool that he'd done the film 'to say something real' but found that during production there was 'too much money involved for this to be just an important story about these people's plight'.

He said: "It became that during the shooting, which is really difficult because you go into a movie trying to say something, and then in the middle of it, people shift gears on you because of the business or people not believing it can be successful without more action or more heroic things.

"It got twisted, and it became very frustrating for me because I found myself doing more of an action movie, which is not what I wanted to do. It was a fight, a battle on everybody's part."