![]() ![]() Nathan Page, as the particularly unpleasant guard Mongo, endows the role with a quality of Eichmann-esque understatement that stops it from descending into super-villain caricature. His fellow escapees are solid, especially Australian Mark Leonard Winter as Leonard Fontaine. It doesn’t, in the style of American countercultural prison films like Cool Hand Luke and The Longest Yard, fetishise the eccentricities and idiosyncratic personas of different inmates.Įx wizard Daniel Radcliffe gives an earnest if forgettable performance as Jenkin, managing to pull off a pretty convincing accent and sweating and frowning in the right places. It doesn’t labour excessively to depict guards as disgusting demons, or prisoners as paragons of virtue. There is something refreshing about the narrative’s minimalism. ![]() This suits the curious nature of the event on which it is based, and there is something refreshing about the narrative’s minimalist approach. In this sense, the film is procedural rather than character driven. The film goes into great detail in its examination of the design and manufacturing of the tools and technologies Jenkin and his crew use to get free, including nine different wooden keys, and their testing under tense conditions. It eschews melodrama and sentimentality, focusing on the mechanics of escape itself. ![]() What is interesting about Escape from Pretoria is the absolutely minor tenor of its narrative. (This, of course, is not always the case – the true story heist film American Animals was one of the most formally engaging films of 2018.) This seems to be a perennial problem with so-called “true story” films, which often depend on the interest generated by this label at the expense of dramaturgy and aesthetic quality. There is nothing notable about its technical construction. A film about mechanicsįormally, the film is uninspired. Indeed, it was shot on location in Adelaide and surrounding suburbs, and looks like it. Like so many low- to medium-budget films in the 21st century, it is a transnational production, with the investment (and therefore risk) spread between Australia and the UK. Based on Tim Jenkin’s 2003 memoir Inside Out: Escape from Pretoria Central Prison, this is the first major feature film from UK-based director Francis Annan. ![]()
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