written for the next issue of Tribune magazine
(film released in the UK on March the 23rd)

Catch A Fire
USA/UK/SA/Fr 2006
Starring : Derek Luke, Tim Robbins
Director : Phillip Noyce
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"THERE are 25 million blacks in South Africa, and only three million whites. Apartheid cannot last much longer." This is a key line in Catch A Fire, a film written by Shawn Slovo (daughter of legendary anti-apartheid activists Ruth First and Joe Slovo) and set around 1980 when the historical tide started turning in the ANC's favour. But it isn't spoken by one of the long-oppressed majority: instead, it's said by Nic Vos (Robbins), colonel in the despised Bureau of State Security (BOSS) while he's interrogating (black, innocent) terrorism-suspect Patrick Chamusso (Luke).

Vos is investigating a bombing at an oil-refinery crucial to the self-sufficiency strategy through which the government compensated for its economic isolation. Though a trusted refinery employee, Chamusso falls under suspicion when he can't provide a solid alibi. When he refuses to confess, BOSS turns its brutal attentions to his wife Precious (Bonnie Henna), causing Patrick to belatedly realises the vile nature of his country's government and to join the ANC's armed struggle...

Although it focuses on a well-chronicled episode of recent history, Catch A Fire has plenty of topical relevance to today's current events. The (true) tale of how an ordinary lower-middle-class bloke - interested in "family, work, football" - became a radicalised "freedom-fighter" (his nom-de-guerre 'Hotstuff' deriving from his fleet-footed soccer-skills) has obvious parallels to Iraq and Afghanistan's current situation. The film is particularly careful to show how torturing innocent individuals can prove disastrously counterproductive for the torturers: an irony of which Vos seems already dimly aware - despite his nasty sunglasses and man-made-fibre suits, this sober, reflective chap is by no means two-dimensional villain.

Promising material, then, but unfortunately Noyce can't quite seem to inject much oomph into the enterprise. As with Fence, the score (this time by Philip Miller) is too obtrusive and heavy-handed, typical of a project that takes an old-fashioned, ploddingly by-the-numbers approach to potentially-explosive subject-matter. Though he'd undoubtedly approved of the basic themes, it's hard to imagine a firebrand like Bob Marley - from whose 1973 album the picture 'borrows' its title - would have been much energised by this disappointingly tepid affair.

Neil Young