Catch A Fire

Despite its harrowing subject matter, director Phillip Noyce’s Catch A Fire comes off feeling like a very soft and unremarkable thriller. It takes the physical anguish and moral ambiguity of Patrick Chamusso’s life of rebellion against South Africa’s opressive white government in the 1980s and digests it into an unthreatening PG-13 genre piece that does little to highlight the intensity and social significance of its tale.

Derek Luke gives a stunningly authentic performance as Patrick and finds himself in fair contest with the steely gaze of an impressively sedate Tim Robbins as Nick Vos, the man investigating Chamusso’s terrorist involvement. The sincere work of the actors is matched by Noyce’s nicely simplistic style as a director. Unfortunately, what begins as a genuinely visualized portrait of South Africa devolves into a thriller of the lamest kind and becomes visually rigid in the process. The life of the movie is in its characters and their motives, but the film lacks the layer of thoughtful meditation that would really give its events depth. It never really navigates the very important transition of Patrick from accused terrorist to actual freedom fighter. Complexity gets lost and explosive action sequences become dominant in the second half. There’s so much more that could have been done with this kind of story that it feels doubly annoying to see everything go to waste.

Still, there are great performances and a number of effective scenes here. In its entirety, it’s a muddled and unsatisfying film, but there are moments of wonderfully portrayed drama. If it had only utilized enough subtlety to deliver its message without becoming an obvious and sloppy mess, it could have been a great film.

Grade: B-