Flip through the latest issue of Gulf Weekly.
Daniel Radcliffe has one of the most fascinating careers of a young actor, according to this spell-bound scribe. And no, I am not including his unintended and fake role as a sickly looking coronavirus celebrity - it only counts if he actually has to do some work to get into character.
Jokes aside, while most of his Harry Potter co-stars have had difficulty shedding their bewitching characters from the series, Daniel has moved effortlessly from strange to scintillating roles, ever sharpening his acting prowess.
His off-screen persona as a humble, likeable and down-to-earth ‘salt-of-the-earth’ human being doesn’t hurt.
Whether he plays a sentient corpse in Swiss Army Man or noted Beat generation writer Allen Ginsberg in Kill Your Darlings, he is able to toe that fine line between slipping into a role and making it uniquely his own.
Escape from Pretoria is yet another notch to his belt, as he plays Tim Jenkin, a South African writer, and former anti-apartheid activist who escaped Pretoria Prison along with Stephen Lee (Daniel Webber) and Alex Moumbaris (re-imagined for the movie as Leonard Fontaine, played by Mark Leonard Winter).
Based on Tim Jenkin’s memoir Inside Out: Escape from Pretoria Prison and adapted for the screen by L.H. Adams and director Francis Annan, the movie tells the story of three political prisoners, serving time for their political actions in protest of apartheid, and how they broke out of prison using wooden keys, careful planning and no tunnels.
They are assisted by fellow political prisoners including South African anti-apartheid ‘royalty’ and Nelson Mandela’s friend Denis Goldberg (Ian Hart), whose role has been rewritten to introduce unnecessary conflict into the story.
With a story like this, the plot itself is straightforward and the conclusion pre-drawn. So one would think that the director and writers would have spent much more time on the social context and character development, especially since these are some iconic characters.
There definitely was some effort on this front. Daniel worked closely with Tim, who he was supposed to be portraying, to get the accent perfectly right and there is some setup as to the apartheid, but it screens like a terrible trailer.
The apartheid in South Africa was a system of institutionalised racism, endorsed by all levels of society. The movie treats it like background noise, with Daniel’s character occasionally mentioning it in his voiceovers, but not really exploring how and why normal human beings came to support the system.
Perhaps that’s too big a task, but at the least, flesh out some of the characters. In a movie about people fighting a system that suppresses black people, it’s ironic that the black characters have the thinnest roles.
Every prison movie, from Shawshank Redemption to Escape from Alcatraz, has secondary characters just as, if not more compelling, than the leads. Even the prison guards have layered lives, not as a justification for their actions, but to illustrate how normal people can become part of abnormal actions, when power dynamics come into play.
But in Escape from Pretoria, the prison guards and the other prisoners are reduced to single-note villains who growl, yell and lose their tempers. The sad part is that the source material is all there. For example, Sergeant Vermeulen, the warden in charge when the real-life escape happened, was later forced to confess to aiding the escape, and Stephen, one of his prisoners, wrote a letter explaining his innocence!
The prison is one of the most interesting ecosystems, but the director treats it like a maze with his three leading mice, err… characters, finding their way out by trial and error.
Daniel Radcliffe, Daniel Webber, Mark and Ian all play their roles well, but when their roles are thinly written and directed, you can’t expect a great movie, no matter how historically significant the social context. And for that, this movie is stuck at a three out of five rating.
