Making Politics out of Cat Food

Rating: 3/10 (25 November 2009)

James Stills writes: "The lead character is portrayed as a passive-aggressive racist who... smooths over police violence in front of the press, and fails utterly to comprehend the situation around him. In short, he's marked for death. ...But when something bad does happen to him the movie's logic goes off the rails and melts into a steaming pile of a cheap Chuck Norris action flick where rifles blaze, grenades explode, and there's no motive to any of it other than just to blow sh*t up for the twelve year old kids in the audience.
Question. If you were making an allegory about Apartheid why would your clueless, selfish, white guy racist jailer be the hero and liberator of the oppressed black people? I should think that in the 21st century old ideas about the White Man's Burden is more than just offensive; it's also a tired cliché. The jailer bureaucrat's only motive seems selfish: he just wants to go back to his old self."
He couldn't have said it any better... The film's noble attempt at political critique of neoliberalism/neoconservatism (privatization of militaries, the administration/bureaucratization of populations, refugee politics, interventions, multinational corporations, etc.) is directly REPLICATED through the racist representations of Africans and by sustaining (for no reason) our identification with a white racist bureaucrat. This critique is then completely lost when the transformers-style Hollywood action takes over.
If you could take the three aspects of the film and divide them up into: -Socio-political critique -Hollywood Action -Hollywood Racism Then the film would be successful in each of its prospective parts.
But it didn't.
And it turned out to be pure garbage of the worst kind.