![]() ![]() “Catch a Fire” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). Robbins’s performances nonetheless suggest a more interesting story than the one here, even if the cross-cutting that often brings them together does much to tear the film apart. Despite being reduced to hieroglyphs of gesture and grimace, Mr. They play like commercials for a film that never materializes, as if someone had tried to fix a problem in the editing and forgotten to take a breath amid the slicing and dicing. In “Catch a Fire,” however, the action doesn’t just move it rushes with such chaotic speed that the scenes don’t have time to develop. Noyce, whose career ranges from hack work like “The Bone Collector” to thoughtful efforts like “The Quiet American,” knows how to keep the action in high gear. This, at least, seems the most charitable explanation for a scene in which one member of the African National Congress announces, as much to the last row in the movie theater as to the other characters, “We don’t kill indiscriminately.” For those hard of hearing, the same message is more or less repeated when Patrick, newly anointed Hot Stuff, straps on some explosives to do his part for the cause. This nasty game of substitution is all too easy to play in “Catch a Fire,” partly because the film fails to dig into the specifics of Patrick’s story or that of South Africa, and partly because the filmmakers don’t seem to have much faith in the audience’s ability to tell the good guys in this story from the bad. The man spirited away, blindfolded, brutalized and never officially accused bears seemingly little resemblance to the casualty who eventually stumbles back home.ĭerek Luke and Bonnie Henna in Phillip Noyces ∼atch a Fire. Credit. Noyce reproduces in squirmingly vivid detail, the police only harden his heart and his resolve. But in trying to soften Patrick up, using barbaric methods that Mr. For a man like Vos, whose dedication to the racist regime seems to border on the religious, the color of Patrick’s skin has already marked him as guilty. Nic Vos (Tim Robbins), accused of espionage and subjected to appalling torture. ![]() Along with two other workers, Patrick is hauled off by the police, who are led by the vicious Col. His awakening comes in the aftermath of a guerrilla attack on the refinery. For him, cooperation means survival, no matter how dehumanizing. ![]() When white soldiers stop the family on a dusty highway, ostensibly to search for saboteurs, Patrick quickly raises his hands in a gesture of accord. Avowedly apolitical, Patrick goes along to get along with his white bosses and black colleagues, earning decent-enough wages to support his two daughters, taciturn mother-in-law and well-named wife, Precious (Bonnie Henna), a beautiful pixie who yearns for better furniture for their small home. The appealing young American actor Derek Luke (the heartbreak kid in “Antwone Fisher”) plays Patrick, a family man who works as a foreman at a fuel refinery some 80 miles southeast of Johannesburg. It’s a film that wants to play as if it were ripped from today’s headlines, but has been shredded into near incoherence. The director Phillip Noyce, working from a screenplay by Shawn Slovo, revisits the ordeal of Patrick Chamusso, an ordinary black South African who, after being wrongly accused of crimes against the racist government in the early 1980’s, became a foot soldier in the war against apartheid. The past collides with the present in “Catch a Fire,” the story of a man who was simultaneously hailed as a freedom fighter and damned as a terrorist. ![]()
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