This is the frustrating thing: I wanted to know more about what drives our main characters, what their motivations are and why I should invest in them as characters more than the apparent rebellious guerrilla warriors the film’s opening paints them as being. Sadly, the screenplay remains largely simplified, giving our characters fairly broad brush-strokes of character traits and small-d “development”, instead leaning more heavily into the escape aspects of the story. The film is written by director Annan with LH Adams in what IMDb credits as the latter’s debut film work, and it’s based off the non-fiction book entitled “Inside Out: Escape From Pretoria Prison” by actual escapee Tim Jenkin (is it a spoiler to say he escaped and wrote a book? Maybe… but I digress). That most of the prisoners within the film appear political – as was the case at the time – isn’t a surprise to anyone, but locking up a bunch of reasonably intelligent activists and political martyrs simply has to invite shenanigans of the escapee type. Prison films are by their very nature inbuilt with a degree of human empathy – you either know the inmate inside is guilty, or they aren’t, but you’re always hoping they escape somehow, because in films it seems prisons are places people keep wanting to escape from. It wastes no time getting into the escape-from-prison stuff, following a brief street scene opening and subsequent courtroom sentencing, and the plot moves swiftly from the “first day” to day number four hundred and something, by which time our heroes have crafted an elaborate mechanism of escape that works through determination and a large chunk of luck. Without doubt, Escape From Pretoria is an incredibly tense film for the majority of its well-used 100 minutes. Will they be caught before they make it to the outside? Through near-misses and close calls, the time comes for them to make their escape they invite Fontaine, who accepts, but nearly all the other prisoners refuse to attempt to escape with them. Over the course of the next 19 months, Jenkin and Lee manufacture wooden keys in order to unlock the various barred doors to not only their cells but the corridors of the prison complex, hoping to make a break for freedom. The late 1970’s, and South Africa is being torn apart by the segregationist and racially discriminatory Apartheid legislation, in which the native African peoples were seen as (and treated like) inhuman beasts it was against this policy that Nelson Mandela fought, and it’s against this backdrop that two white South Africans, Tim Jenkin (Radcliffe) and Stephen Lee (Daniel Webber) are imprisoned in Pretoria’s Central Prison, alongside fellow inmates like Leonard Fontaine (Mark Leonard Winter) and Denis Goldberg (Ian Hart, who co-starred alongside Radcliffe in Harry Potter & The Philosopher’s Stone, as Professor Quirrell), and immediately begin planning their escape. Hallmarks of great prison films, such as Shawshank Redemption, The Great Escape, Escape From Alcatraz and even Papillon, threaten to overwhelm expectation for Escape From Pretoria, but a compelling leading turn from Daniel Radcliffe (who will never escape his Harry Potter past even if he does grow a fabulous 70’s era beard) hold this thing together exceptionally well. The atmosphere of Nelson Mandela’s incarceration and the South African Apartheid-era racial divide permeates every frame of this thriller from British director Francis Annan, pulsing with the evil menace of an inhuman cruelty, and while perhaps not being as politically savvy or pointed as it probably aspired to, will keep you on the edge of your seat for the entire 100 minutes you’re watching. Synopsis: Based on the real-life prison break of two political captives, Escape From Pretoria is a race-against-time thriller set in the tumultuous apartheid days of South Africa.Īt times difficult to penetrate, at others impossibly tense, the South Australian-UK production of Escape From Pretoria skimps on character but delivers a well-made, competent prison escape film. Principal Cast : Daniel Radcliffe, Daniel Webber, Ian Hart, Mark Leonard Winter, Nathan Page, Grant Piro, Adam Ovidia, Adam Tuominen.
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