'Catch a Fire'

Friday, November 03 2006, 12:12 AM EST

Contributed by: David Elliott

â€˜CATCH A FIREâ€™

"Catch a Fire" only catches fire in some remarkable landscape views, and shots of a giant refinery that is the prime object of sabotage by anti-apartheid fighters in South Africa.

To call the theme dated would be unfair. It is true that the Afrikaner racist regime imploded rather than exploded, giving way humanly to Nelson Mandela's majority government. But the greatness of that is in putting violence and retribution aside.

Greatness is absent from Phillip Noyce's film, an often rather plodding, page-turning treatment of a segment of the struggle. At the hub is appealing Derek Luke as Pat Chamusso, a black refinery foreman accepting the system's rules for the sake of his family, and because it beats working in the mines and fields.

Inevitably, his ambition runs afoul of a white police state that sees questioning from below as subversion by "derelicts and communists." Quite a few people in and around the African National Congress, main beam of the freedom struggle, were also in the Communist Party, which kept the faith even while employing the party's usual termite tactics.

But Patrick barely seems political. He's a Reborn Man, hungry for a peaceful life but triggered to fury by mean, meddling injustice. Good acting can't overcome his halo, any more than it could for Canada Lee in "Cry, the Beloved Country" (as Steve Biko, Denzel Washington rose up through the halo in "Cry Freedom").

Patrick joins, trains, flees, returns and will be the necessary spark to detonate the refinery. Tracking him in the fixated spirit of "Les Miserables" is white cop Nic Vos (Tim Robbins, with solid Afrikaner accent).

Scripted by Shawn Slovo, son of fabled white (and Red) activists against apartheid Joe Slovo and Ruth First, the film falls short of his work on "A World Apart." The movie is a decent teacher and a testifier, but except in some good streaks of action and the stressed relation of Patrick with his wife (Bonnie Henna), burdened by the name Precious, it's rigid with cliches.

It takes huge dramatic skill to move excitingly along such a firmly planted groove. A lot of sincerity and situational fidelity don't lift "Catch a Fire" to that level.

A Focus Features release. Director: Phillip Noyce. Writer: Shawn Slovo. Cast: Derek Luke, Tim Robbins, Bonnie Henna, Terry Pheto, Jessica Anstey. Running time: 1 hour, 41 minutes. Rated R. 2 stars.

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