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ESCAPE FROM PRETORIA
Director: Francis Annan Cast: Daniel Radcliffe, Mark Leonard Winter, Daniel Webber, Ian Hart, Nathan Page, Grant Piro, Len Firth, Lliam Amor, Adam Tuominen, PJ Oaten, Ratidzo Mambo MPAA
Rating: Running Time: 1:46 Release Date: 3/6/20 (limited) |
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Review by Mark Dujsik | March 5, 2020 With Escape from Pretoria, co-screenwriters Francis Annan and L.H. Adams show that one can mostly remove the politics from a story about apartheid-era South Africa. Such a move may be possible, then, but that leaves a more important question: Is it the wise choice? It's not in this particular case, because this is a story, inspired by a true one, about political prisoners, white men fighting against the apartheid regime, in their year-and-a-half-long plan to escape from prison. Removing the politics of their detention gives Annan, who also directed, and Adams plenty of time to focus on the specifics of the planning. It also takes away the motivation for, the stakes of, and the importance of the escape in the first place. The main character is Tim Jenkin (Daniel Radcliffe), who, with his friend Stephen Lee (Daniel Webber), is arrested for distributing pamphlets for the outlawed ANC party. The two men are tried and convicted, sentenced to incarceration for years (12 for Tim and eight for Stephen) at Pretoria Central Prison. Almost immediately, Tim begins to plan an escape. The two friends gain an ally in Leonard (Mark Leonard Winter), a French man looking at a two-decade sentence, but they receive some pushback from Denis Goldberg (Ian Hart), an anti-apartheid leader who was tried with Nelson Mandela, who believes a failure might make the movement look bad. Once the story shifts into the prison, the whole of the story becomes one of planning, executing those plans, and lots of close calls. Every time there's a new step in the plan, something inevitably goes wrong, and we start to anticipate the problems. The specific details, taken from a book by Jenkin, show how ingenious (fashioning wooden keys to various cell doors from memory) and patient (spending night after night after night in the task and only advancing a matter of feet) these men are—and really were. As repetitive as the schematics of the plot may be (a problem, a solution, a near miss, and repeat), Annan does occasionally generate some suspense by being as still and patient as the characters in his staging. For what purpose and goal is all of this effort, though? Escape from Pretoria barely establishes apartheid and the fight against it as a plot device. As it turns out, removing the politics from an inherently political thriller only leaves the routine mechanics. Copyright © 2020 by Mark Dujsik. All rights reserved. |
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(for violence, language and some disturbing material)
