| Summary: |
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. It's a film that wants to play as if it were ripped from today's headlines, but has been shredded into near incoherence.
Patrick, a family man who works as a foreman at a fuel refinery some 80 miles southeast of Johannesburg. 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. 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. For him, cooperation means survival, no matter how dehumanizing.
His awakening comes in the aftermath of a guerrilla attack on the refinery. Along with two other workers, Patrick is hauled off by the police, who are led by the vicious Col. Nic Vos ( Tim Robbins ), accused of espionage and subjected to appalling torture. 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. But in trying to soften Patrick up, using barbaric methods that Mr. Noyce reproduces in squirmingly vivid detail, the police only harden his heart and his resolve. The man spirited away, blindfolded, brutalized and never officially accused bears seemingly little resemblance to the casualty who eventually stumbles back home.
Soon after he is released by the police, Patrick ends up first in neighboring Mozambique and then Angola, where he sings songs of freedom under the auspices of the African National Congress .
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.
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