In My Country: Critic Reviews

Just when you thought Hotel Rwanda had rendered obsolete the sort of neocolonial uplift that investigates black trauma through a white person's eyes, along comes In My Country.

John Boorman's high-minded but hopelessly wooden film makes the fatal mistake of turning characters into mouthpieces.

Because Ann Peacock's pedestrian script couldn't make any movie come to life, our interest in these two characters is nil.

A series of brief, appallingly simplistic vignettes that, rather than conveying the depth and complexity of South Africa's history and culture, distill it to the point of distortion.

What do you say about a dramatically woeful movie whose heart and politics are in the right place? Well, you sigh as you turn your thumb downward.

The film, an international co-production about the aftermath of South African apartheid, has won peace awards and comes with a thumbs up from Nelson Mandela himself, none of which make its contrivances easier to swallow.

Boorman's bathetic tourism is unconscionable for a subject of this magnitude.

An academic dis-cussion punctuated by shots of magnificent countryside harboring unspeakable grief.

Watching it is like drinking a glass of Alka-Seltzer before the tablet is dissolved. Afterward, you're glad you drank it -- it wasn't that hard to swallow -- but you would've preferred a nice chardonnay.

There is something not quite right about the film itself.

A stirring, large-souled movie about an event that was both an exposure of horror and a celebration of forgiveness.

It shows what can go wrong when a good-intentioned filmmaker mixes historical tragedy with Hollywood banality.

The combo of cultural cringe and a schematic, didactic screenplay strangles the human emotion.

The film is thoughtful entertainment, not medicine.

Failing to get beyond trite Hollywood romantic conventions, sermonizing caricatures and 'I was just following orders' explanations does a great disservice to history.

Need[s] to be seen, as essential history and as demonstration of a form of social reckoning where compassion triumphs over passion, and the olive branch over the gun.

Black, white and clunky.

The picture hums with a falsely optimistic Kumbaya vibe, such that its mildness is almost an affront.

See In My Country anyway, because it's doubtful we'll get another movie too soon that raises the issue of vengeance versus forgiveness -- and endorses the latter in the name of a nation's spiritual well-being.

The charisma and hard work by his two leads allows Boorman to succeed beyond all expectations.

Unfortunately more didactic than dramatic, and although surprises emerge right up to the end, there's precious little suspense, mystery or uncertainty.

In spite of narrative missteps that negate the possibility of an empathetic protagonist, "In My Country" does viably introduce the African principle of "Ubuntu" whereby evil transgressions are absolved rather than revenged.