Catch a Fire
“Catch a Fire” stars the appealing and sober-minded actor Derek Luke as the perfect symbol of apartheid-era oppression in South Africa. Patrick Chamusso was a sweet-natured refinery foreman who enjoyed a higher standard of living than his friends and colleagues, who ribbed him for his deference to whites. Detained and tortured, along with his wife, for a crime he didn’t commit, Patrick became radicalized and joined the underground combatants of the African National Congress. Yet “Catch a Fire” admirably refuses to idealize its hero or milk vengeance for a cheap emotional payoff. Luke brings rakish energy to Patrick, who in addition to his wife and two daughters has a son with his on-and-off mistress. Meanwhile, director Phillip Noyce and screenwriter Shawn Slovo allow at least two dimensions to the police colonel who pursues Patrick. Played with mildly self-conscious smugness by Tim Robbins, the protector of apartheid is devoted to his family and mindful of the danger that violence will strike close to home. As in his exemplary “Rabbit-Proof Fence” and “The Quiet American,” Noyce examines the human cost of wrongheaded government policy, although “Catch a Fire” is slighter. It waffles uneasily between astringent political docudrama and crowd-pleasing suspense thriller, ultimately settling for a not-quite-satisfactory middle ground. Yet it’s a worthy and unpretentious illustration of an axiom worth remembering: that one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.
LISTEN: Catch a Fire