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Stander (2003)

Posted By: Efgrapha

Date: 28 Dec 2021 20:23:31

SD / DVD IMDb

A lawman fed up with the corruption in Apartheid-era South Africa takes to robbing banks in this gritty crime drama from writer/director Bronwen Hughes. The title Stander refers to Andre Stander (Thomas Jane), an ambitious second-generation policeman whose strategies and experience make him the perfect candidate for commander. But when the privileged Stander is chosen to direct the police force against a brutal, majority-led uprising in Soweto, he becomes so disgusted with his actions that he decides to undermine his own authority as an officer. His means for doing so is to moonlight as a bank robber, partly out of disgust for the force and partly as an adrenalin-fueled act of deception. After pulling more than two dozen heists, Stander is caught – but it isn't long before he breaks out of jail, and fortified by two hardened-criminal pals, Lee (Dexter Fletcher) and Allan (David Patrick O'Hara), he resumes his anti-authoritarian crime sprees. Stander premiered at the 2003 Toronto Film Festival.

Synopsis by Michael Hastings, Allmovie.com

"Stander" is an extremely good picture that, with a little tweaking, might have been a great one. It has you in its grip from the beginning, when the title character – powerfully portrayed by Tom Jane, showing evidence of serious star power – appears out of control behind the wheel but is only having a little fun, all the way to the bittersweet ending.

The twists and turns never let up, and it was only later, when no longer under the movie's spell, that I realized where it fails to deliver. The psychological motivation for Andre Stander, a lauded Johannesburg police officer in the late 1970s, to make an abrupt shift over to the dark side is inadequately explained.

Stories about cops turning bad are a dime a dozen. But Stander doesn't merely accept bribes or pin crimes on innocent people. He becomes a criminal himself, committing dozens of armed robberies at banks across South Africa. The daring of his crimes – hearing on a car radio that one bank had concealed a huge amount of money from him, he returns the same day to take it at gunpoint – is a way of thumbing his nose at authority.

Director Bronwen Hughes may have felt hampered in explaining such behavior by the fact that the movie is based on a true story. Stander is infamous in his homeland, a combination Robin Hood, Jesse James and Clyde Barrow. Yet few outside of South Africa have heard of Stander, which gives Hughes and screenwriter Bima Stagg some poetic license. After all, the real Barrow hardly was the magnetic figure Arthur Penn made him out to be in "Bonnie and Clyde," and every filmmaker who's taken a crack at James presents him in a different light. Hughes and Stagg would have better served by creating a clearer vision of Stander instead of the murky one they offer.

The initial explanation for his turning from Dr. Jekyll into Mr. Hyde seems a stretch. Stander, like other police officers at that time, is enlisted to control shantytowns whose black populations are rioting over apartheid. Hughes, whose previous movies, "Harriet the Spy" and "Forces of Nature," gave little indication of her dramatic scope, re-creates one of these shockingly uneven battles in which the cops are armed and the protesters have only sticks and rocks. An overview shot of the charred countryside after the struggle says it all.

Stander kills an unarmed protester, and his guilt is posited as motivating his first robbery, an idealistic theory backed up by his turning the loot over to the first black person he sees. However, whatever clicked in him could just as well be attributed to his anger over how Johannesburg has been left unprotected while the city's police force is off stifling riots. What better way to demonstrate his opposition to this policy than by getting away with multiple crimes? It clearly amuses him when he's asked to investigate the robberies he's committed. When he's called in to consult on his own crimes, Jane wears a smirk on his face that appears inspired by Anthony Hopkins' Hannibal Lecter. Stander hardens after he's apprehended and does time in prison. He escapes and forms a gang. The difference between them and common criminals blurs, as the money they steal goes into mansions instead of the pockets of the poor.

Gang member Lee McCall (menacingly played by Dexter Fletcher) is a loose cannon who disobeys Stander's policy never to fire a gun. In another scene of extraordinary visual power – for which credit should go to cinematographer Jess Hall as well as Hughes – McCall loses it and shoots out the ceiling lights in an elaborate bank building. Glass is shown falling everywhere like confetti.

This should be Jane's breakthrough role, after several movies like "The Punisher," "Dreamcatcher" and "The Sweetest Thing" that failed to ignite at the box office. (The actor may be signaling he's a different man by billing himself as "Tom" in "Stander," instead of Thomas, as he's gone by until now. ) He wears as many different wigs as Bruce Willis in his crime capers, and changes his personality just slightly with every hairpiece.

He reflects a kaleidoscope of emotions in his eyes and facial expressions as his character goes from stand-up guy to thug. He also has chemistry to burn with Deborah Kara Unger, as the woman who marries Stander not once but twice yet never understands him. Their love scene on a beach is almost in the same league as Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr's in "From Here to Eternity" (though these past icons didn't have to appear naked, as Jane and Unger do, to register heat).

"Stander" is riveting, even if the man himself remains as much an enigma to the audience as he is to his wife. At the end, there's the obligatory explanation of what became of everyone portrayed. The fascination with their fates is a measure of Hughes' success at making us care about this rogue's gallery.

Review by Ruthe Stein, San Francisco Chronicle

IMDB
Wiki

Director: Bronwen Hughes

Writers: Bima Stagg

Cast: Thomas Jane, David O'Hara, Dexter Fletcher, Deborah Kara Unger, Ashley Taylor, General Stander and other