John Malkovich has done what he rarely does: he has failed. In trying to navigate the ambivalent character of David Lurie, a self-satisfied English professor with a predilection for the young and the exotic, Malkovich does not stir mixed emotions, but leaves the viewer's sentiments untouched. Watching a young black South African douse Lurie with some inflammable liquid and then torch the man, I fixated on the special effects, indifferent to the ostensible suffering of an empty character.
Jessica Haines does a much better job in the role of Lurie's daughter Lucy. Had the movie been anchored in her life and not in her father's, I might have been left with something other than drifting pieties about the horrors of violence and the complicated legacies of apartheid in South Africa.
