Political corruption has become an itching wound in post-apartheid cinema. The country is splitting apart with the gluttonous politics of its leaders, the amnesia of our historical trauma, and in films like How to Steal 2 Million or 31 Million Reasons, characters hang at the ethical edge of a world in which honesty no longer makes sense. iNumber Number is a heist-thriller which plunges into the undersides of this South Africa. In its blistered opening act, Chili (S’dumo Mtshali) and his partner Shoes (Presley Chwenyagae) are two cops in the rush of a sting operation. They burst through a claustrophobic labyrinth of corrugated iron on a nerve-charged manhunt. The music thrums and roars intensely, the camera lurching and swooping with kinetic energy. This is a film which triumphs in the technical savoir faire of the action genre.
But when the duo victoriously returns to their downtown precinct having captured the criminals, the police commissioner denies them their share of a promised reward. “His father was a comrade,” he mouths with grim nonchalance, and the two become aware that institutionalised criminality has foreclosed their ambitions. “The country owes us,” Chili says as he begins his moral descent, surrendering himself to the national game. Using his undercover contacts to learn of a planned cash-in-transit heist, Chili decides to work with the criminal outfit and share their plundered gains rather than turn them in. At a first glance, this provides the filmwith a fractured psychological setup: two embattled cops whose economic desperation forces them into an uneasy alliance with the enemy. But iNumber Number does not aspire to be anything other than a hyper-stylised crime caper and its use of genre tropes dims the complexity of its characters’ motivations. Its cast of blood-edged players are more like flesh capsules all destined to succumb to the film’s Tarantino relish for a rising body count.
The gang they infiltrate is headed by Mambane (Owen Sejake), a snarling alligator in a sportscoat of dull-cream plaid. He assembles a team of venomous personalities – trigger-happy double-crossers and each idiosyncratically murderous – like Skroef (Israel Makoe), Stakes (Brendon Daniels) and Gugu (Hlubi Maboya). Their hideout is a derelict warehouse captured with gruesome charisma, like a mouthful of broken teeth. Shadows spill achingly across its jagged industrial interiors. The cinematographer’s exquisite sense of space and location gives this meeting-point an eerie atmosphere for the torture and chaos which unfurls within its desolated walls. Even the heist scene, taking place on a lonesome highway under a ragged quilt of cloud, is superbly visualised. Chili stands guard over an empty bridge with his black shirt clung tightly to his sweaty pectoral curves. The broken bark of gunfire sends tremors of nervous energy across the landscape. iNumber Number manages to overcome the embarrassments of earlier South African action films by mastering the instruments of tension.
In spite of its many stylistic victories, iNumber Number is challenged by the same kind of schizophrenia which threatens to undo otherwise promising films like Ian Gabriel’s gangland coming-of-age drama Four Corners. In both, we have a world precariously suspended between realism and fantasy. These films are anchored by the gravitational urge of authentic South African struggles, the way our peculiar political realities interrupt ordinary lives and force everyday people into dangerous, slippery moral compromises. Yet, by transplanting the pre-established tropes and representational expectations of mainstream action genres, their characters become emptied-out of their urgent psychological complexities, limited by the demands of the genre. The psychic reality of corruption in South Africa – masterfully enfolded in Chili’s remark that “the country owes us” – is not explored as an existential pressure, but rather becomes a trigger for an intense 90-minute splurge of violence.
Of course, iNumber Number half-inoculates itself from these criticisms by never pretending to be anything other than an explosive thriller. But the sacrifice of these intriguing dynamics in favour of spectacular bloodbaths leads to its greatest loss. Its characters are entangled in stereotype, and large portions of the film are devoted to overlong displays of carnage: the film becomes a thrilling, but safe and ultimately predictable tour through a carnival of crime genre tropes. iNumber Number carries itself with an admirable and professional enthusiasm, but theme of corruption is so pervasive in our national film and literature right now, that one can’t help but long for the perfect balance of action and introspection that would free this genre to offer a more critical vantage on national reality.