Impunity is the latest successor in a long line of failed experiments South African cinema has conducted with the crime genre. Several crime thrillers are released each year and so pervasive is the effect of crime on the South African imagination, that even our romances (Hard to Get), slapstick comedies (Blitz Patrollie) and coming-of-age dramas (Four Corners) centrifuge around criminality. Most crime films are obsessed with certain morbid symptoms of our present political situation, especially corruption, which is the nation’s favourite complaint even though, with the exception of last year’s Cold Harbour, no one ever manages to say anything interesting about it. Impunity is spliced-through with grainy, security camera footage of everyday violence and robbery in Johannesburg, a dire attempt to crowbar national allegory into the plot, and accelerate the sense of emergency that usually accompanies crime films: the country becomes another ravaged territory of the third world, where thirsting for blood and money are the ultimate horizon.
The film follows two psychopathic lovers, Derren (Bjorn Steinbach) and Echo (Alex McGregor), an insufferable Bonny & Clyde pair who spend much of the film either gambolling naked on the beach and having impromptu sex, or cutting a swathe of senseless violence throughout the land on their road trip of death. They indiscriminately slaughter everyone, from their employers, to their friends, to a minister’s daughter, and honestly, there are soft-core pornographies out there which have better narrative excuses for getting characters naked on screen (the sex in this film is so embarrassing it breaches the inner sanctum of laugh-out-loud). It is almost impossible to dredge up even a sliver of sympathy for these two, and having to sit through at least five minutes of watching them pawing at each other with lupine arousal on the beach while drowsy post-rock chords hover above the scene is almost too much to bear. Their adventures in murder make no sense, either, coming across as just one context-less cascade of dead bodies.
Impunity squanders the opportunity to offer an interesting investigation into corruption, with that theme being outsourced to, and incarnated in, a shadowy government minister who barely speaks. In this sense, the film is no different from 31 Million Reasons or How to Steal 2 Million– it’s a simple catharsis-machine, allowing the suburban audience to purge themselves of the accumulated terrors of modern life, to indulge the vicarious thrill of the threatening wilderness of South African society. It is equally beholden to that old strategy of turning the country into a noir confection upon which to stage a typical crime thriller. But its greatest disappointments are even more simple: not even a fig-leaf of tension exists to make any of the action worthwhile, the pacing is abysmal with the narrative clotting at strange moments, and in a desperate moment during the final showdown, the criminal Derren shouts, “there’s no place for the white man in this country”, which earns the badge for the most disingenuous attempt to add political edge to an incoherent movie.