Lout of Africa
At one point in Newmarket's action picture, Stander, star Thomas Jane's aimless anti-hero, mutters: "This was supposed to be fun." Ostensibly based on a true story of a South African police captain who became one of the nation's most notorious criminals during the early 1980s, Stander is not fun—it is tedious.
Jane's title character, looking like one of the Village People, is a policeman who mumbles, shuffles, gets married and parades in the buff for no reason, and that's before he reports for duty. Once he does show up for work, Stander is assigned to maintain law and order during a race riot. That's when the white police captain shoots and kills a black man, though it's never clear what caused the riot. Still, Capt. Stander feels guilty. Suddenly and inexplicably, he hates South Africa's racist Apartheid policy; he decides to rob banks instead.
While Stander would have us believe his descent into crime has something to do with his convictions, he's more like a half-baked Robin Hood than a modern avenger. In one of the movie's low points, he's too busy dancing naked while blasting hard rock to explain to his new wife that he has decided to become a thug. There is not one major black character in a movie that treats race as superficially as it depicts South Africa.
In the screen's most unintelligible anti-hero since Mel Gibson's poorly dubbed Mad Max, Stander robs banks, frees hardened criminals from prison, steals cars and kills cops, presumably having a grand time while doing it, though his sourpuss makes it hard to tell. The dialog is best sampled with this telling exchange between Stander's bank-robbing thugs: "Where are you f—-ing going?" "I'm just going."
Though the made-for-cable plot does move along, Stander goes nowhere fast, halted by director Bronwen Hughes's jerky camera and the sort of distortion that has become standard in pictures. Before the gang of three—no blacks in this wild bunch—meet their slow motion fates, Stander, the would-be punisher for the poor, manages to rip them off, too.
For anyone whose knowledge of South Africa extends beyond college-bred slogans, Stander strikes a condescending tone, given South Africa's current state of lawlessness. Whatever the real story of this cop turned thug, the people of South Africa, white and black, are suffering the true, non-Hollywood story: a nation plagued by disease, rape and mob rule.
Jane's title character, looking like one of the Village People, is a policeman who mumbles, shuffles, gets married and parades in the buff for no reason, and that's before he reports for duty. Once he does show up for work, Stander is assigned to maintain law and order during a race riot. That's when the white police captain shoots and kills a black man, though it's never clear what caused the riot. Still, Capt. Stander feels guilty. Suddenly and inexplicably, he hates South Africa's racist Apartheid policy; he decides to rob banks instead.
While Stander would have us believe his descent into crime has something to do with his convictions, he's more like a half-baked Robin Hood than a modern avenger. In one of the movie's low points, he's too busy dancing naked while blasting hard rock to explain to his new wife that he has decided to become a thug. There is not one major black character in a movie that treats race as superficially as it depicts South Africa.
In the screen's most unintelligible anti-hero since Mel Gibson's poorly dubbed Mad Max, Stander robs banks, frees hardened criminals from prison, steals cars and kills cops, presumably having a grand time while doing it, though his sourpuss makes it hard to tell. The dialog is best sampled with this telling exchange between Stander's bank-robbing thugs: "Where are you f—-ing going?" "I'm just going."
Though the made-for-cable plot does move along, Stander goes nowhere fast, halted by director Bronwen Hughes's jerky camera and the sort of distortion that has become standard in pictures. Before the gang of three—no blacks in this wild bunch—meet their slow motion fates, Stander, the would-be punisher for the poor, manages to rip them off, too.
For anyone whose knowledge of South Africa extends beyond college-bred slogans, Stander strikes a condescending tone, given South Africa's current state of lawlessness. Whatever the real story of this cop turned thug, the people of South Africa, white and black, are suffering the true, non-Hollywood story: a nation plagued by disease, rape and mob rule.
