It’s hard to find the link, but Toronto Globe & Mail critic James Adams has called Philip Noyce‘s Catch a Fire “a nail biter…a fast paced, compulsively watchable political thriller about what happens when a previously apolitical working man (Derek Luke) decides to join the armed struggle against an oppressive govt, in this case Sout Sfrica’s now defunct apartheid regime.
“Tim Robbins deftly plays a fiendishly clever Boer security agent trying to hold back the growing power of the ANC, but the real stars here are Luke as Patrick, the politicized refinery worker, and Bonnie Henna as the wife whose jealousy has consequences far beyond hearth and home. Based on a true story and shot on location, Noyce’s film is like The Battle of Algiers, unsparing in its portrayal of the many prices everyone pays when the ‘old is dying and the new cannot yet be born’.”