Heart of the Hunter(3 / 5)
Based on a novel by Deon Meyer, who also co-wrote its screenplay (alongside Willem Grobler), it’s not a bad little action thriller – especially for an embattled South African political climate that teeters between corruption and conspiracy. The premise is hardly novel: nor is the plot armouring of the known political thriller devils – no one can be trusted; the assassination attempt, no matter how successful, can’t actually remove the target because those in need of elimination would rather get their claws onto him than see him exposed or assassinated; insidious elements are deliberately turning a regrettably imperfect state even more imperfect; and there remains an unwashed populace fit only to suffer the sins of their misguided leaders and stumble blindly into the cooling cauldron of their own, one-pot justice. It’s not exactly original, and only mildly original in execution. But where Heart of the Matter does deliver is on the true-to-life performances of its cast, with roles tailored well, and performed better. The lead, Bonko Khoza (Zuko), has an inherent simmering lurking behind his eyes. He was a hired assassin sent to dispatch bad choices for leadership of South Africa’s new democracy and, finding a conscience as a hitman, has walked away from the fun and into the unceremonious preglobalised grey drear of a thin Afrikaans metro bruised by years of South African political slapstick. He has a wife, a home, a stepson, and earns his bread at a five-star bike dealership. Living clean can’t make one escape chequered pasts,umbent president absent on tour, it’s a good time for his pals to want to persuade him to furlough his paternal instincts and continue offering the rest of the country a kind of serial atonement for whatever left his soul raw and steely. To get rid of the one presidential hopeful guaranteed a winidant puts it, ‘a man with sociopathic rampage rattling in his soul like a death’s head intend on possessing our nation’. There’s a change to Zuko’s eyes, constant but chute-like narrow; one moment, he’s biking across the karoo to escape manhunting Hounds of Hell and the next chatting up his stepson about farming.
Director – Mandla Dube
Cast: Bonko Khoza, Connie Ferguson, Tim Theron, Nicole Fortuin, Masasa Mbangeni, Sisanda Henna, Peter Butler, Deon Coetzee
Streaming On – Netflix
The main villain, Mtima (Sisanda Henna), is hardly a fleshed-out character at all – he’s a stereotype all the way. And there can be only one suspect: the writing. Here, making him the sort of person he is (rather than his being a representation of entitlement/corruption) would have been a better course. Nothing says that such a being doesn’t exist in the South African set-up (the truth is that such a beast exists in any political set-up) but, for pity’s sake, show us what made him this way in the first place? All we’re given is his riding the beast. Eating, drinking and being merry at the Government’s expense; using the country’s state security agency as a private, personal amnesty for him and his family; bugging political opponents so that he can indict them on trumped-up charges. OK, I know that you want him to appear evil; that’s a necessity. So why do you have to be cliché about it? The film would have benefited from drawings on several of its existing characters: Johnny Klein (Peter Butler), Mtima’s former rival, as well as Nicole Fortuin’s (Mpho Skeef) and Deon Coetzee’s (Deon Lotz). The former’s relationship with Zuko is neither explained nor examined; ditto the latter (once a media maverick, a stand-out journalist) because his past story is never told. Here is some of what is lost to us in the chases, action sequences and assumed ‘knowledge’ when we are told but not shown.
While the script is sometimes ponderous and misjudges the occasion a few times too many, the performances – particularly of some of the ancillary staff – are uniformly strong and hold it together. It’s not just Zuko, although he is a torrent of male posturing, but Johnny Klein, Naledi (Nicole Fortuin) and Mike Bressler (Deon Coetzee) in particular who all deserve our full attention. Too much of what happens before the story reaches its inevitable resolution threatens to tarnish the sheen of these performances. And yet for all its flaws, Heart of the Hunter repays the viewer for all that it tries to say in its opinionated analysis of South Africa’s current politics, which cannot extricate itself entirely from the shadow of its Apartheid past. ‘You are an enemy,’ Zuko tells Mtima. ‘You kill the people like you used to kill our ancestors. When they were white men.
