OK but...

Rating: 6/10 (4 September 2009)

Don't get me wrong - this is a good movie in many ways. The special effects are great, it is grittily realistic, mostly good acting especially from the main character, yadda yadda. The semi documentary thing works well enough, and blends OK with the 'real' action. But in many respects it is quite predictable and not saying much that we don't already know. Indeed in many ways it is rehearsing some well worn clichés about how we react to outsiders. Worse it seems to fall back on Hollywood formulae towards the end - references to every American Marine movie may well have been unintentional I suppose, but at one point I was also thinking of ET.
It's a difficult movie from the point of view of the shear number of murders and vapourisations that occur - it must be well over 100. It means I left the theatre feeling more numb than anything else - other emotions regarding the ending (which I anxious not to give away) were drowned out by the gunfire and flying blood. The film showcases the emotion of anger, hard and bitter anger. Ironically the callousness of some of the characters must be fostered by a movie which numbs us to the reality of violence, so in a sense the movie is participating in the problem rather than offering a vision of another way of doing things.
I think we have to treat this movie as entertainment of the gruesome kind (that I associate with Peter Jackson), certainly not a horror film, though horrific in parts; but we should not treat it as saying anything new or insightful about prejudice because it doesn't. And what it does say is not at all subtle - perhaps this was the point, but I'm not sure anyone on the wrong end of a bludgeon was ever truly convinced of anything - isn't this what the story of South Africa has really shown us? So why bludgeon us with a film?