Hey everyone. Capone in Chicago here.

Due to its seemingly dated subject matter (the brutality of police during 1980s, apartheid-era South Africa), my biggest fear is that audiences won’t see Catch a Fire because they’ll think they’ve seen it done several times before on the big screen, most prominently in 1987’s Cry Freedom with a young Denzel Washington as Steven Biko. But Catch A Fire has something of a hidden and far more modern agenda than simply retelling the true-life story of Patrick Chamusso (the exceptional Derek Luke), who was falsely rounded up by police after an attack at the nuclear power plant facility where he worked. Chamusso was tortured by government-sanctioned law enforcement, headed by Tom Robbins’ steely cool Nic Vos, but eventually set free. The police even tortured Chamusso’s wife (newcomer Bonnie Henna) just to get him to talk.

Where Catch a Fire draws its modern parallel is what happens to Chamusso after his release. His rage and anger at what was done to him and his family drives him to join a rebel organization bent on plotting and carrying out attacks against the South African establishment that is holding his people down. Are they terrorists or are they freedom fighters? This is the question posed and pushed to the forefront of the film, a question that has loud echoes in today’s battles against terror.

The film makes the clear point that Chamusso was absolutely the wrong man to mess with in that day and age in South Africa. He had made as much of a good life as a black man in South Africa could at the time. He held a management position at the power plant, and was making probably more than anyone else in the township where he lived. He was the last person the police should has suspected. But the film never makes the mistake of painting Chamusso as a perfect man. He is actively cheating on his wife (a fact that effectively landed him in jail in the first place since he was unwilling to account for missing hours in his timeline when the explosion at the plant happened), a fact that comes back to haunt him when he actually does plot a more substantial bombing of the nuclear facility.

Director Phillip Noyce has carved out a nice career for himself putting the microscope on the world’s gross acts of injustice in such moving works as Rabbit-Proof Fence and The Quiet American (of course, he’s also celebrated covert American military action is such films as Patriot Games and Clear and Present Danger), and Catch a Fire may be his finest effort.

What is so unusual and riveting about this particular story is the relationship between Chamusso and Vos. It’s almost as if Vos is fully aware that he is caught in a brutality machine he’s caught up in, but he doesn’t have the strength to end his participation in it. In many ways, he sees clearly the end to the current way of life but decides to let it catch up with him rather than take steps to ending the practices of torture himself. There’s a scene in which Vos brings Chamusso to his home for dinner (while he’s still under arrest), and you can’t help but get a glimpse at how life should be between the two men and the two races.

Luke and Robbins don’t have that many scenes together, but when they share the screen, the tension level is palpable. They represent so much to each other and to us that you feel as if the entire future of the civilized world rests on their encounters. I’m not ruining anything by telling you that Chamusso was eventually caught and sent to the same island prison where Nelson Mandela spent so many years. And we do get an almost unnecessary sequence in which Chamusso spots an aged Vos and has to make the decision whether to enact his revenge or not. Make sure to stick around to the end of the film for documentary footage of the real Chamusso, updating us on his current efforts in South Africa.

Catch a Fire is one of the finest examples of a film telling two stories on two levels. The juxtaposing of Chamusso and Vos’ lives provides the surface-level tale, which is fascinating on its own. But when you include the subtext about how fighting terrorists can result in creating more terrorists, you can’t help but take pause in today’s global situation and sadly see how little the world has changed.

Capone