SnoopyStyle It's 1980 South Africa. Patrick Chamusso (Derek Luke) is a coalfield oil refinery foreman trying to keep his head down. When the refinery is bombed, Afrikaner anti-terrorist Colonel Nic Vos (Tim Robbins) investigates. Patrick is falsely imprisoned and tortured along with many others including his wife. He was actually with another woman that night. Eventually they are released. Patrick is angered into joining the ANC and sabotage the refinery himself.This is a good movie because it shows the reason behind Nic Vos. He's not a simple monster which is the easy way to go. Tim Robbins' reserved mannerism keeps him from being a cartoon villain. Instead he is a family man doing evil to protect his world. The investigation isn't unreasonable but the method is brutal. This movie shows how men with reasonable intention can descend into evil brutality.

fedor8 A totally transparent, asinine analogy is forced down our throats here between South Africa's racist apartheid regime and Bush's government.A totally transparent - and even more despicable - analogy is being made between the "noble" ANC terrorists and Islamic terrorists. Basically, terrorism is justified here by the liberal propaganda machine - yet again. Worse yet, the terrorists (the poor dears) are allegedly FORCED into it, i.e. they didn't have a choice in the matter. This of course fits in neatly with Marx's idiotic notion that man is inherently good/perfect hence does evil only when coerced into it (by evil capitalist forces, preferably).So killing civilians randomly in the streets is okay, says Tim, Tinseltown's self-absorbed, hilariously deluded, barely literate "intellectual".The film provides absolutely zero criticism of the fact that the ANC is, was and always will be a Marxist, un-democratic movement (they've been in power for over 20 years now!). Also avoided is the obvious hot issue of the day: the constant slide into economic disaster the country has been going through ever since Mandela's "freedom-fighters" won control over the country. And I mean all of the control. It's a dictatorship.But did anyone truly expect an intelligent, unbiased, realistic portrayal of the freeing of S.A.'s black people from a movie which Tim Robbins agreed to star in? Tim is a talentless nepotist (the son of a famous country singer) whose only path towards Tinseltown glory was by putting on the U2 Bono Cap Of Self-Righteousness and a phony Michael Stipe World Humanitarian Scarf.

Scott-101 In one of the many movies that were set in Africa this past year, Catch a Fire seemed the most derivative and least eventful. Based on a true story, Luke stars as Patrick Chamusso, a revolutionary in the anti-Apartheid struggle in South Africa. Tim Robbins, in a convincing performance, stars as government agent Nick Vos, who seeks to interrogate Chamusso for a suspected terrorist crime. The movie focuses mainly on the transformation of Chamusso as a peaceful citizen to a government-despising terrorist, which would have been interesting if the movie hadn't left out so much. By the time the film starts to get to the heart of the story, it ends.The movie and DVD's official Website promotes the film as "an action-packed journey of sabotage, corruption, alienation and murder," but the film offers very little in the way of action -- or plot development, for that matter. Catch a Fire feels like two hours of exposition to a larger plot that is unfortunately left out.

TxMike I am not a historian and I know little about apartheid in South Africa. However in this movie we find that Patrick Chamusso is a real person and that most of the story in this movie really happened the way it is told. A good movie, with high production values.Tim Robbins is Colonel Nic Vos, and he sounds authentic with either an Irish or South African accent. He is a member of the ruling white government and always on the watch for revolutionists.American Derek Luke is believable as Patrick Chamusso, a humble refinery worker with a family and who is wrongly suspected of being a revolutionist. Torturing him for names, which he cannot give, they also end up mistreating his wife, Bonnie Mbuli as Precious Chamusso. This angers him, makes him fully realize the need to combat apartheid, and he leaves home to train with the revolutionists.The movie is often not fun to watch because of the themes depicted, but it has a favorable ending, and we see one of the freedom fighters who helped end apartheid in the early 1990s.