Originally published on metropolis.co.jp on March 2012

The Bang Bang Club was a quartet of daredevil photojournalists who covered the bloody violence in South Africa in the last days of apartheid. Their photos brought this little-acknowledged war to the world’s attention, and for this they deserve commendation. This movie, however, from a memoir by the two that survived, and made by a documentarian, is disappointingly light, muddled and comes close to trivializing their efforts as well as the suffering of their subjects. While the excellent recreations of street battles are real-world and immediate, the characters remain two-dimensional and the narrative thin.