CATCH A FIRE - earnest, important, dull

CATCH A FIRE is an earnest drama based on the true story of a black South African man called Patrick Chamusso. He was a successful foreman in the power-plant that supplied half the country's electricity. He cared for his wife, his two daughters and coaching the local footie team: he kept himself away from the ANC's rising campaign of terror and fight for liberation. The defining moment of his life was the point at which he was wrongfully arrested for committing a terrorist attack on the power plant. The white South Africans' brutal treatment of his wife prompted him to leave the country, join the ANC and return as fully-trained freedom fighter.

The movie is nicely-filmed and well-acted. Derek Luke (Antwone Fisher) does well in his role as Chamusso and the supporting cast is fine, despite Tim Robbins risible attempt at a white South African accent in his role as the head of the Anti-terrorist squad, Nic Vos. However, the film falls well-short of the claim on the poster that it is a "thriller". There is a little chase at the end as the army tries to hunt down Chamusso before he blows up the power plant, but for the most part this is not an action film in the BLOOD DIAMOND vein, but a drama about a man's coming to political consciousness.

And here we find a problem. Because the movie never really gets inside the skin of the lead character. Chamusso is never more than a cipher - observing the surrounding political events and leading the viewer through the landscape. In particular, the movie skips over the two parts of Chamusso's life that I thought would have been really interesting: how he got through his long imprisonment on Robben Island and how he came to forgive Nic Vos. I find this whole concept fascinating: the idea that a whole country could go through a truth and reconciliation process. And here, through two men, we could have had a glimpse at how such a process worked. Sadly, this second act is wrapped up with undue haste by the director.

So, while CATCH A FIRE is an important story, it also makes for 90 minutes of desperately dull cinema. Moreover, it's a big disappoinment for fans of Phillip Noyce's previous films, RABBIT PROOF FENCE and THE QUIET AMERICAN.

CATCH A FIRE was released in the US and Australia in 2006 and in Kuwait, Denmark, Sweden, Germany, Spain, Singapore, Japan, Egypt and France earlier this year. It is currently on release in the UK and opens in the Netherlands on April 19th and in Italy on June 23rd. CATCH A FIRE is also available on Region 1 DVD.

CANDY - sex, drugs, uneven tone

Another day, another distinctly underwhelming movie at the London Film Festival. Today's offering is a low-budget independent Australian flick starring Heath Ledger as a junkie poet married to a young painter turned junkie-hooker played by Abbie Cornish. The first third of the movie - entitled Heaven - shows them getting high and getting laid - lots of delirious graphically-shot sex. The second third of the movie drifts from loved-up drug use to bored married drug use. It's almost as though the writer has transposed the bickering of Men Behaving Badly to Australia, except that Caroline Quentin's responsible nurse is now a junkie-hooker who puts the meals on the table and Heath Ledger is the layabout boyfriend. Despite dealing with horrific subject-matter, this middle section of CANDY is - bizarrely - *funny* in tone. Ledger and Cornish are aided in this by the casting of Geoffrey Rush as a Chemistry Professor and part-time cook. It's very odd.

The final third of the movie contains harsh subject matter and the shift in tone is hard to get a handle on. I found it impossible to take these characters seriously in their pain when I had sat laughing with them on a sofa while they injected heroin into their arms a couple of scenes beforehand. And this uneven-ness of tone is what skewers the film in the end. It is no REQUIEM OF A DREAM - it does not make great technical leaps or have an interesting visual style or challenge us with its narrative and performances. And it is no TRAINSPOTTING - it does not successfully blend black humour and the grim reality of drug use. It's just a couple of decent performances in search of a more coherent script and more ambitious direction.

CANDY played Berlin, Toronto and London 2006. It has already been on cinematic release in Greece, Australia, Russia, Portugal and Italy. It opens in the UK on November 3rd and in the US on November 17th. It opens in the Netherlands in January 2007.