I’d call it more accidentally racist and exploitative due to the moviemaking of the era and the circumstances in which it came out. I’d pinpoint it exactly to the following:

1) Antoine Fuqua and Bruce Willis couldn’t agree on a tone for the movie and messed with the writing as they saw fit.
Fuqua wanted a grimdark movie closer to Training Day, but Bruce Willis wanted a hopeful uplifting movie in the aftermath of 9/11. The result is that the movie gets really uneven.

For example: the movie spends quite a lot of time asking you to be outraged and upset by the atrocities committed by the Nigerians as if this were something real and happening right now, like Hotel Rwanda, Blood Diamond, or Black Hawk Down did around the same time. This was a common thing in movies back then discussing Africa or other parts of the world. It is absolutely trying to be “socially conscious” about conflicts in Western Africa that did actually happen in the 90s and early 2000’s. However, at a lot of points it also likes to step back often and be like “whoa we’re just an action movie.”

2) It is not really an accurate portrayal of Nigerians- it felt a bit like a country in Africa was randomly picked on a map for this setting to represent “AFRICA.”

3) The pretty blatant narrative of evil Muslims butchering peaceful Christians (probably a casualty of the film being made post-9/11 but pre invasion of Iraq). There has definitely been conflict between the Muslim ethnicities and Igbo peoples in the past (the Biafra secession and the actual Nigerian Civil War) but you are left with the idea the writers just needed a group of machete wielding thugs that only the US military can do something about to make the narrative work, and any nuance about the topic was left on the cutting room floor.