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Film: Johnny Mad Dog | reviews, news & interviews

Film: Johnny Mad Dog

Film: Johnny Mad Dog

Johnny be bad: a chilling tale of child soldiers in Africa

The raucous young lads swaggering down the streets of a charred, deserted town could be the Lost Boys in an African production of Peter Pan. Some are in their late teens, others are no older than 10 or 11, but most are decked out in fancy-dress garb and accoutrements which suggest a recent dip in the dressing-up box.

One is sporting a Santa Claus hat, another a pair of wings; there is a crash helmet, beads, a neon-red wig. These are child soldiers in an unspecified modern African country, and they are wearing whatever they have managed to steal from their victims as they’ve rampaged from one town to another. The distinctive look is rounded off with an AK47 slung over each slender shoulder, ready to be fired on a whim. Leading them all is Johnny Mad Dog (Christopher Minie), an impassive 15-year-old commander of the Small Boy Unit, who seems shut away in his own world, oblivious to the chaos and carnage around him.

Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire’s chilling film, following in the blood-stained footprints of the recent German-Austrian child-soldier drama Heart of Fire, was shot in Liberia with a cast drawn largely from real ex-infant combatants. That partly explains the picture’s rawness and urgency, but credit is due also to Sauvaire’s decision to largely dispense with narrative; the first 40 minutes in particular are terrifying in their near abstract litany of horrors, as Johnny and his gang conclude one tense encounter after another with torture, rape or murder. The hand-held camera stays tight on the violence, allowing us only the briefest of pauses for breath, such as the disconcerting shots of the gangly youth Pussy Cat dressing himself calmly in the white wedding dress and elbow-length gloves of a murdered woman. Outside, a child is forced at gunpoint to shoot his own father.

Interspersed with the unit’s brutal campaign is the story of Laokole (Daisy Victoria Vandy), a teenage girl who flees her besieged hometown with her younger brother, before dashing back to rescue their amputee father in a wheelbarrow. It is Laokole who is the catalyst for some mysterious change in Johnny. Descending the stairs of a house where she has been hiding, she comes across the stone-faced killer. And, astonishingly, he doesn’t spray her with bullets, which until that point has been his customary greeting.

Of course, the film needs this scene - it introduces the possibility that Johnny isn’t quite the automaton he appears to be - but in the hands of these young naturals there is nothing functional about it. Those few seconds in which they lock eyes in some kind of telepathic pact are vital, and Sauvaire distinguishes himself by not italicising the moment.

From then on, the movie’s tenor changes subtly; doubts and vulnerabilities creep into the unit. The tiny but terrifying No Good Advice (Dagbeh Tweh), who guns down strangers the way other scamps his age squash snails, develops a sentimental attachment to a pig he has stolen, and becomes distraught when Johnny threatens to kill it. Still, No Good Advice’s loss is the movie’s gain - that porker’s head on a stick introduces a productive comparison with Lord of the Flies.

The closer that Johnny Mad Dog comes to a conventional narrative format, the less potent it feels; the final scenes in particular aren’t half as provocative as the filmmakers believe them to be. (There’s a slickness and self-satisfaction creeping in that seems to make sense when you notice that one of the producers was, Mathieu Kassovitz, otherwise known as The Man Who Squandered the Promise of La Haine.) That aside, the picture is admirably lean and uncompromising, and properly appalled by what it feels compelled to show us. Meanwhile, any twinge of guilt over the possible exploitation of the young cast members should be assuaged by the knowledge that the filmmakers have established the Johnny Mad Dog Foundation to support ex-child soldiers.

Johnny Mad Dog is released on 23 October.

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