I wanted to catch The Bang Bang Club in Toronto last year but scheduling prevented me from doing so, but I am still interested in giving it a look as it was picked up by Tribeca Film and will hit theaters on April 22.
This is one of those “based on a true story” movies centering on Greg Marinovich (Ryan Phillippe), Joao Silva (Neels Van Jaarsveld), Kevin Carter (Taylor Kitsch) and Ken Oosterbroek (Frank Rautenbach) as four young combat photographers who captured the brutality and violence associated with the first free elections in post Apartheid South Africa in the early ’90s.
Screen Daily‘s Mark Adams called it “extremely watchable” and added saying, “Intense and often very brutal (though rarely overly graphic), The Bang Bang Club is a film that deserves careful distribution, and will appeal to lovers of the gonzo journalist movie.”
Over at Variety Peter Debruge wasn’t as supportive saying writer/director Steven Silver “should have taken more liberties with the story, since [The Bang Bang Club‘s] entertainment value suffers at the expense of trying to capture the events as they happened — an ill-advised endeavor.”
The trailer for the film has just arrived and I can say the only thing that concerns me is what looks like a forced love story with Malin Akerman and the threat of a lot of picture snapping and the concerned looks that follow as the characters take into account all they are documenting and the moral consequences of standing by while taking pictures of people dying. This is territory where this kind of material can get that, been there, seen that feel. Here’s to hoping that’s not the case.
