South African director Oliver Schmitz is best known in this country for his 1988 film "Mapantsula", an absorbing political drama about a Soweto petty crook who finally makes a stand against the apartheid regime.
His latest, which he also wrote, returns to the same Johannesburg township, ostensibly liberated but still rife with poverty and lawlessness, through the character of Sox (Kgoroge), a middle-class black actor with a comfortable lifestyle and white girlfriend.
Auditioning for the part of a gangster, his lack of street credibility counts against him, so he goes back to the ghetto to swot up on his bad-boy technique.
Coming across a childhood friend Zama (Seiphemo) who now runs a car-jacking gang, Sox sees an opportunity for valuable research, but it doesn't take him long to realise that he may be out of his depth.
There are slight echoes of Michael J Fox's "The Hard Way" here - at one point, Sox teaches Zama some gunplay he learned from American cop movies - but the humour is more of the 'live fast, die young' variety, the car chases more spontaneous than stunt-filled.
Kgoroge convincingly portrays a dislocated man seduced by the sweaty adrenalin of danger, his acting poses soon shifting into a real personality change, while Seiphemo and Moshidi Motshegwa - as Grace, a hard-bitten Soweto woman Sox grows close to - fit right into their surroundings.
Schmitz has long had an affinity with his country's black population, and he's come up with a realistic take on the problems of township life. He poses challenging questions about the social divide in the new South Africa, and asks what opportunities are really there for finding a new life - aside from hijacking one.
Hijack Stories (2002)
