Movies Reviews

The Bang Bang Club - Tribeca Film Festival Review

By Ron Wilkinson May 16, 2011, 22:05 GMT

A drama based on the true-life experiences of four combat photographers capturing the final days of apartheid in South Africa. ...more

The production is too glossy for the deadly serious and viscerally real subject matter that forms the backdrop of this photojournalist thriller.

Writer/director Steven Silver has had some successes in the last five years in building a foundation for his documentary and action/drama films. However, he is still feeling around for that particular combination of screenwriting and directing that will produce the “big one.”

Tribeca Film Festival in New York is showing his most recent effort “The Bang Bang Club” and it is getting some attention. It is fast paced, full of wartime action and represents an acceptably true depiction of the life of one of the most swash-buckling role models in the present day world.

The current reigning king of the intellectual adventurers is the wartime photojournalist. The job description combines the techno-savvy of digital photography with artistic sensitivity and, above all, a sense of reckless disregard for safety that approaches outright nihilism.

In place of the old biker adage “Die young and leave a good looking corpse” there is the new advice to die young and leave a published photograph. Or perhaps to die young and leave a Pulitzer.

This shaky if not downright ridiculous philosophical foundation dooms this film from the start. To restate the good points, it is chock full of great action scenes. The shooting, weapons and bullet impacts are done with such commendable expertise as to now and then launch into what really looks like cinema verite'.

At times it is hard to tell it is scripted. The bad points are that the photojournalists in the film represent the real thing to about the same extent that Tom Cruise in “Top Gun” represents actual military fighter pilots. The whole affair comes off as more of a recruitment vehicle for naïve teenagers than as a real depiction of the everyday life of a professional.

The cartoonish nature of a death wish film theme is bad enough but the going really gets rough when the film addresses women. There is no other way to say it: women in this film are bimbos. From the first meeting with the juvenile, superficial death wish adventurer characters the women want sex and they want it now.

This would be fine considering co-star Malin Akerman is as sexy as they come but Silver fails as miserably filming the bedroom as he succeeds mightily in filming the battlefield.

Taylor Kitsch gives it his best shot as Pulitzer winning Kevin Carter who is depicted as a pot chain-smoker who gets drunk and stoned and runs his car into trees in the war-torn no-man’s land of apartheid South Africa. The film is set at a scorching hot time in the country’s history, the years after Nelson Mandela was released from prison in 1990 leading up to his election as president in 1994.

In this period the SA government heinously recruited member of the rival Zulu tribe to fight Mandela’s ANC. The result was hand-to-hand civil war in homes and neighborhoods. This is shown in unrestrained living color in this film.

If you will have nightmares seeing a man beaten, set on fire and then hacked to death with a machete, better give this one a miss. Although this violence is well done in the context of film production the film veers dangerously towards political activist porn.

The behavior Ryan Phillippe (part of the zillion person award winning ensemble casts of mega hit “Crash” and “Gosford Park”) is forced to exhibit in playing Pulitzer winner Greg Marinovich is simply hard to believe. He gets off the bus and walks into the neighborhood of fighters angered to murderous intensity and asks them for an interview. If this is really the truth it has to be portrayed in a more believable manner than in this film.

Or, perhaps, the truth is stranger than fiction. Sometimes too strange to believe.

Silverman and the five or six leads in this film have great thing ahead but this production is too simplistic for the dreadfully serious subject matter it contains. Kevin Carter committed suicide about a year after these events took place and nobody could blame him after seeing what he experienced.

The problem the viewer will have is reconciling that level of lethal distress with the beer-commercial party scenes and the female fawning that seem to be equal parts of the war photographers’ lives.

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Directed and Written by: Steven Silver
Starring: Taylor Kitsch, Malin Akerman and Ryan Phillippe 
Release Date: Tribeca FF April 20, 2011—No Planned Release
MPAA: Not Rated
Runtime: 107 minutes
Country: Canada / South Africa
Language: English
Color: Color