The Bang Bang Club

“Action, Then Cameras”

“The Bang Bang Club” doesn’t offer enough bang-bang for your bucks. It’s an amateur version of a mature movie. It looks like the real thing on the surface, but lacks any real depth.

Ryan Phillippe plays real-life combat photojournalist Greg Marinovich. As a member of a gang of photographers, Marinovich finds himself competiting with his colleagues to get the best shot of the bloody action that surrounds them daily.

These wartime paparazzi are based in the South African town of Soweto in the mid-90s. Very little is explained about the politics of the conflict they are covering. They just follow the bloodshed the way Hollywood paparazzi follow Lindsay Lohan.

Their photos are then sold to the photo editor of a Johannesburg newspaper played by Malin Akerman. Almost as an obligitory element to the film, Akerman and Phillippe develop a romantic relationship that leads absolutely nowhere. Akerman’s British accent is so bad that it makes Madonna sound positively royal by comparison!

There are some good moments involving one of the photographers who went on to win a Pulitzer Prize for his classic shot of a vulture stalking a starving African girl. The movie shows us how he came to get the shot, and also debates the issues about why he didn’t simply help the girl instead of just standing on the sidelines to document it. That subplot could fuel an entire movie. Here it’s just a very small piece in a messy little puzzle of a film that never quite explodes the way it wants to.

DVD Double Feature:
1984’s “The Killing Fields” told the story of the invasion of Cambodia through the eyes of New York Times reporter Sydney Schanberg and his Cambodian-born photojournalist Dith Pran. It won 3 Oscars and remains the greatest example of a war film from the perspective of journalism. John Malkovich is extraordinary as an American photojournalist trying to help Pran escape the danger. An unforgettable film.