Much more than just a simple revenge thriller, South African film 180 (now on Netflix) plays out in the gray areas of morality and legality. Alex Yazbek writes and directs this thoughtfully rendered story of a desperate man right on the cusp of having nothing to lose, played by Prince Grootboom, one of the principals in the Netflix erotic thriller series Fatal Seduction. Might you say he has a death wish? Maybe, and the parallels with a certain thorny ’70s-cinema staple are hard to ignore.
180: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The Gist: Johannesburg. A traffic jam. Zak (Grootboom) just wants to get his seven-year-old son, Mandla (Mpiloenhle Ndebele), home and ready for cricket practice. Zak looks ahead at the line of cars in front of him and sees two men execute a hit in broad daylight. Bang. Someone’s dead. As commuters flee their vehicles, the perpetrators turn to Zak, who pleads mercy – there’s a child in the backseat. One points his gun, the other deescalates, and they steal someone else’s car. Just moments prior, Zak had a conversation with Mandla about the bullies at practice. Mandla says it’s fine – he has two sandwiches, he gives them one, and he still has one. Is that right? No. It sticks in Zak’s craw. But the failure of coaches and supervisors to do anything about it might be a reality that needs to be accepted, like the men pointing guns at Zak. Not that that’s right, either, mind you.
They go home, touch base with mom/wife Portia (Noxolo Dlamini), then head to cricket. On the way, a red van, a taxi, runs a red light and tags Zak’s Audi. Yes, he drives an Audi. He has a damn nice house and a chain of burger restaurants. He seems to do pretty well for himself. Anyway, Zak gets out of the car. Karwas (Kabelo Thai) seems to be relatively new at driving; his boss Lerumo (Warren Masemola) was showing him the ropes so he can drive around the big boss, Eezy (Fana Mokoena). Just moments prior, we watched Lerumo blow a man’s head off at Eezy’s urging. Eezy’s taxi and junkyard businesses seem to be part of his criminal empire. Point being, these aren’t the kind of bullies you push back against, but Zak has already had himself a day and isn’t about to let Lerumo push him around and drive away. He has an example to set. But he gets his ass beat by Lerumo and other cab drivers – and gets another gun pointed at him. A scuffle ensues. The gun goes off. And the bullet hits little Mandla in the chest.
The incident sets off a chain of events that would put most people in a padded cell. While Mandla teeters on the edge of life in a hospital bed with his mother weeping beside him, Zak gets entangled in bureaucracy: The family health plan lapsed for unidentified reasons, requiring a frustrating call to customer service, and another to his brother Zuko (Bongile Mantsai), who works at the burger joint and will bring him cash to pay the insurance bill. And Zak consults with police detectives Floyd (Desmond Dube) and Layla (Danica Jones), who are on the shooting case – and, notably, allow a suspect to go free because “there are processes” they need to follow. But Zak is about to create his own process. By the seat of his pants. Take things into his own hands. Is this what desperate people do? It’s what this desperate person does, and to use understatement, it seems ill-advised.
Photo: Netflix
What Movies Will It Remind You Of? Although 180 isn’t as extreme as either of Death Wish or Falling Down, it strikes me as a compelling blend of the two, with a more modern, 21st-century approach to the material.
Performance Worth Watching: Although Grootboom plays a character led by his emotions instead of his intellect, Dlamini is the true emotional core of the film, delivering a small, but potently heartbreaking performance.
Sex And Skin: Very brief shower nudity.
Photo: Netflix
Our Take: Most thrillers of this ilk would be content to put their protagonists between a rock and a hard place and watch them wriggle. They wouldn’t take the time to lay out parallels between schoolyard bullies and the more dangerous ones in real life, or include a scene in which the protag has a deeply humane conversation with an ostensibly annoying person in all of our lives, a phone customer-service rep. But Yazbek takes pains to plant real ideas in 180’s dialogue, in its large and small scenarios. We get the sense that the story is deeply embedded in its South African setting – it’s finely detailed in many ways, some likely to be lost on foreign audiences – but also broad enough in its plot and themes to be universal.
Those themes address an impatience with a system that’s at worst broken, but is at least inefficient and corruptible. Who among us hasn’t snapped at a customer-service worker representing an indifferent corporation, or fantasized about exacting revenge when we’ve been wronged? Banking on karma to punish people for their evil actions is an even greater fallacy than trusting the system to deal with them. It’s easy to see why a man like Zak would push his very normal, average self to extremes, e.g., breaking into a junkyard with a pistol in his belt, or confronting men who are far more dangerous than him. The film does more than just pontificate on the empty quasi-satisfaction of revenge.
180 is a well-considered thriller illustrating how it takes just a slight nudge of the knob on the pressure cooker of the modern day-to-day to create an explosion. Yazbek maintains a rock-steady tone that’s serious but, despite certain plot developments, not overwhelmingly grim, weaving in well-modulated melodrama and thoughtfully rendered characters. The director indulges a few moments of visual overstylization, and in the writing hand-waves away a few implausibilities and coincidences that threaten to shatter the illusion of reality. But the film stands out for adding up to significantly more than the sum of its parts.
Our Call: 180 is an above-average thriller that offers tension, suspense and considerable food for thought. STREAM IT.
John Serba is a freelance film critic from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Werner Herzog hugged him once.
