Obeying the grand rule of all unimaginative crime thrillers, City of Violence begins with the death of a young, white woman. Of course, black people also die from time to time, but rarely is this considered enough of a departure from the order of things to be worthy of plot and conspiracy. Two postapartheid cops are assigned to sleuth through the clues: there’s Ali, the black cop with a private history of political terror (Forest Whitaker), Brian Epkeen, the burnt-out white cowboy (Orlando Bloom), and the stick of biltong (uncredited), forever dangling out of his mouth like a faux cigarette, the crudest reminder from this French production that we are on holiday in South Africa.
The tourism department will be pleased that Cape Town has received an exploitative new branding as the “city of violence”. This is precisely the sort of mystification that travels across the planet and confirms the bias that violence in this country is a naturalistic detail, as much a part of our geography as the mountain and the coast. In more malignant moments, it persuades wealthy foreigners that they can arrange honeymoon assassinations here and be assured the carnage will simply blend into the corpse-splattered background. This is not to wish away the depth of horror experienced by the real victims of this restless interlude in the country’s history. The problem is that City of Violence uses South Africa and its troubled politics as an excuse, a justification for its meaningless spectacles of B-movie gore. South Africa itself is just here to provide an exotic backdrop. So, we get an aerial shot of a sprawling labyrinth of shacks and claustrophobic shoot-outs in the narrow corridors between them. In the process, Cape Town is slowly disfigured into another generic “third-world” fantasy, taking its place alongside Brazil and Mexico. On Muizenberg beach, a coloured gangster draws a sword and chops off a cop’s arm before decapitating him. This is an Acapulco-style gangland murder that comes across as ridiculous and one of the many moments in which the film blurs reality in pursuit of blood.
In what passes as an acceptable condescension, the film-makers shoot in South Africa and get locals to act as extras but won’t let South Africans play the lead roles. I’m sure Bloom and Whitaker attract more prestige and capital to the film, but the other side of this decision means South Africans are once again excluded from representing themselves. The viewer is treated to that usual South African fate when watching films like these: we have to contend with Bloom’s accent, somewhere in the general region of a Australian expat suffering an identity crisis, and Whitaker who, when he nobly attempts the line “they found tik in her blood”, manages to come across as Congolese. We’re made to dumbly suffer through these alienated imitations for the benefit of an international audience. The only actors who get it right are the coloured gangsters who bring a threatening, low-slung attitude to their roles, even as they are eventually scripted into Tony Montana caricatures.
As Ali and Epkeen pursue a string of dead white girls, they start stumbling into a deeper conspiracy and ever more shallow references to history. Apartheid chemical weapons programmes are glibly referenced and the duo discover that a super-tik is being manufactured that causes its users to go feral. The story has the two policemen, ebony and ivory, pass through a series of obligatory cop drama scenes – the strip-club, the troubled visit to a prostitute, the police station (where cops are adventurously depicted working on iMacs), and a few flashbacks of gruesome apartheid-era brutality and truly pointless uses of the country’s most notorious racial insult thrown in for political edge.
City of Violence is another tourist jaunt through a blistered third-world, hemmed in with enough death to give foreign audiences their shot of voyeuristic thrill. Local viewers will be treated to the distinct pleasure of watching their country get twisted into a cliché.