1/2/2024 0 Comments Escape from pretoria keyShooting on location in Adelaide, Australia - a handsome but none-too-convincing stand-in for the South African highveld in exterior scenes - DP Geoffrey Hall keeps the camera moves antsy but not fussy. Characterization takes a distant back seat to the ingenious practicalities of the mission itself. Once the plan is set in motion, the film itself feels unlocked: As a re-eenacted chapter of anti-apartheid history, “Escape from Pretoria” may not feel entirely authentic, but it knows its prison-movie terrain, from Alcatraz to Shawshank, inside out.Īs our central trio trace a taut treasure trail of keyholes and cupboards, Annan’s direction settles into a smooth groove of high-tension setpieces, teased out to breath-suspending effect. The third partner in the escape, Egyptian-born activist Alex Moumbaris, has been fictionalized as enigmatic Frenchman Leonard (Mark Leonard Winter), who has no discernible history or motivation at all, while two black allies in the plan are marginal presences at best. The real-life Goldberg was much more supportively involved in the prison-break strategy if the script does him something of a disservice for the purposes of greater narrative friction, that’s not the fastest and loosest it plays with facts. Jenkin hatches a plan to whittle wooden facsimiles of the keys to every door separating them from the outside world - an almost naively simple scheme that necessitates a complex network of hiding places and bluffs, as vindictive guards begin to suspect something is afoot. Banished to the vast prison complex of Pretoria, the country’s administrative capital, Jenkin and Lee are protectively counseled by veteran liberal political prisoner Denis Goldberg (British veteran Ian Hart, giving the character a geezer-y air), who advises them to keep their heads down and to serve their time with dignity as “prisoners of conscience.” The youngsters, countering that they are instead prisoners of war, immediately set about an escape plan regardless. Adams’ workaday screenplay, the actor’s signature anxious-earnest mien is leaned on a lot here, as is his overly explanatory voiceover, which provides a broad primer on apartheid for any uninformed viewers, along with a reminder that “freedom and equality should be fought for at all costs.”įor Jenkin, that cost is a 12-year prison sentence, handed down after he and his best friend Stephen Lee (Daniel Webber, tersely charismatic in a thin part) were caught planting a leaflet bomb to distribute ANC protest flyers in central Cape Town. Given the limited backstory filled in by Annan and L.H. Sporting a squirrelly shag wig and a valiantly attempted but wayward Cape Town accent, Radcliffe plays Jenkin, a middle-class sociology student turned underground activist for the African National Congress, with his own brand of puppyish but righteous commitment. Meanwhile, it may struggle to find much of a fanbase in its own country of setting, where audiences might reasonably wonder why at least one South African actor couldn’t have been cast in a principal role. The casting of Daniel Radcliffe as Jenkin lends it some marquee appeal, but this still feels like efficient VOD fodder, sure to age as memorably as “Stander,” that other blandly internationalized biographical romp pulled from the same passage of South African history. The last 30-odd years have seen such a wealth of diverse, resonant personal histories emerge from the ashes of apartheid - not least that of the actual, not-white Mandela - that “Escape from Pretoria” could well have missed its moment entirely.Īs it is, it’s been done cheaply and (sort of) cheerfully as an Australian production by British writer-director Francis Annan, focusing heavily on suspense mechanics as if to modestly understate its factual heft. It’s surprising that it’s taken this long to reach the screen, given how sveltely his gripping story fits into a genre-film uniform. Jenkin’s book of the same title was published in 1987, when he was still living as a fugitive from nominal justice in London.
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