Leofwine_draca This is a well-made movie, to be sure, with particularly good cinematography that takes you right into the heart of a war zone and never breaks away from it for a second. But it's also an utterly depressing viewing experience, and I hated almost every second of watching it. I wonder if the director would have done better by presenting this as a documentary explaining some of the background of the conflict.JOHNNY MAD DOG follows a group of child soldiers, led by the titular character, as they wreak havoc in Liberia. They're part of a rebel uprising whose goal is to overthrow the president and all those who side with him, and what follows is 90 minutes of rape, cold-blooded murder, and general mayhem.The film is devastating and headache-inducing. There are no glimmers of hope here, no comedy, just unending bleakness. 90% of the dialogue is shouted at the top of the voice and the violence goes on forever, forcing the viewer to become part of the depravity. Needless to say, none of the characters are sympathetic and I spent most of the time hoping for it to end.

dragokin I've been drawn to Johnny Mad Dog by the fact that Mathieu Kassovitz was one of the producers. Despite his escapades with Hollywood he was able to amass a fine body of work, so i was curious what he got involved with this time.I saw this movie as a powerful docudrama that shows the realities of a prolonged civil war in Subsaharan Africa. It follows the protagonists in a cold, almost detached, matter-of-fact way. When you give weapons to kids life becomes a simple but deadly game. The movie offers no answers, since it seems there are no answers. In this sense it is similar to Kassovitz's movie Hate (1995).But the strongest message is that this topic has been known for decades. As if the civil wars in Africa were a part of local folklore and there is nothing to be done about it.

omoshango7 I really don't know what to make of this film. It is supposed to be a fictitious, generic African civil war though the setting is obviously Liberia , and the story relates very little to the actual 14 year Liberian nightmare.It's like a montage of rebel atrocities without context or explanation. Johnny Mad Dog is the 16 year old CO of a small boy unit, part of the "Teah John Rebels" fighting against the mysterious "Dogo" people. But the "Dogo" despot is a composite of Charles Taylor and Samuel Doe.The Director, Jean Claude Sauvant, seems familiar with rebel behavior, tactics and language, but not very interested in the story behind them. Kids do not become such monsters without severe childhood trauma. We see what they became, but not a hint of the razed villages and murdered parents, violated female relatives and forced conscription into the rebel armies, or the international factors involved, the plunder of diamonds, timber and other natural wealth, the arming of the rebel factions by the global capitalist mafia.The language is authentic Liberian English and the child actors are good. Christopher Minie is a very believable Johnny Mad Dog. But there is very little "story": Basically, Mad Dog kills, rapes or terrorizes everything in his path, but in the end is killed by one of his victims, a twelve year old girl with presumably no combat experience, who beats him nearly to death with his own AK, and then shoots him. Makes absolutely no sense.And there are no subtitles. Even I had trouble sometimes understanding what they were saying. Has to be problematic for an international audience. And why are the Bangladeshi UN peace keepers speaking English with a Liberian accent? The film apparently provided employment for a number of Liberians. What other financial benefits are to be derived by the Liberian people is not clear. But if the country benefits financially, does it also benefit in terms of its image? Does the film help a traumatized nation heal? Or does it just add to the plunder and rape of the country? Were the forced sex scenes really necessary, for instance? The image of a well dressed, obviously educated female newscaster being violated on the floor of the TV station is very powerful. What kind of subliminal message is being sent? To a country run by westernized Africans? I understand there are some unresolved differences between the filmmakers and the government of Liberia . I do not know if they are financial or cultural, but I suspect the gratuitous sex and cannibalism depicted, and the generally unflattering portrayal of Liberians is part of it. At least I hope so. I really can't see how MICAT would put its stamp of approval on this film.But you could make the argument that it is a realistic portrayal of Liberians, I suppose. It is interesting that Sauvant inserts an MLK voice-over where Dr. King proclaims that a hundred years after the emancipation proclamation, "negroes" were still not free. One can see the continuity in the terrorization of Africans by their own for the economic benefit of the global capitalists. From the 18th century kings and chiefs who used their hired thugs to raid villages for slaves and terrorize the countryside to the Black slave drivers on the plantations, from the Liberian Frontier Force and the ethnically "Americo" but culturally Grebo Yancy and Tubman to the PRC, Charles Taylor and the other warlords, to the gangs terrorizing ghettos in America and Africa, the central thread running through the history of African people is that of African hired thugs doing the dirty work of the global capitalist mafia, Africans aiding in their own destruction for the profit of others.In that context you can better understand a Johnny Mad Dog. Traumatized people make the best slaves, slave raiders, slave drivers, or "rebel fighters," and others who Fela referred to as "Zombie." It's called the Willie Lynch theory. People think it started on America 's southern plantations and in the West Indies . But it didn't. It started right there on the west coast of Africa .The chaos, anarchy and terror depicted in this film uncannily resemble the state of affairs at the time of Liberia 's founding. The only thing missing is the slave ships loading up with people in Vai Town or Trade Town . Seems this reign of terror for the enrichment of the coastal African elites and their European partners was only briefly interrupted by the 138-year existence of the first republic.And that is a chilling, very sobering thought.

trpuk1968 Covering the same territory as BLOOD DIAMOND this couldn't be further away from Hollywood's treatment of child soldiers. However, although sentimental and following the classical Hollywood patterns, BLOOD DIAMOND does have its merits. I'd also compare this with SAVING PRIVATE RYAN because there's a similar visceral realism, on a budget which was probably one percent of Spielberg's film.This is difficult to watch from the opening scene onwards as the protagonists, boys from their early to late teens, commit the most appalling acts of depravity - such as forcing another child to shoot his father dead, raping a young woman. One of these acts is witnessed by a young girl, who Johnny Mad Dog is to face at the films denouement. The director overcomes his budget limitations with effective use of hand-held camera, close in, jerky, tightly edited, frequently with the look of actual documentary footage. Things are often obscured, you can't quite see whats going on, which further disorientates and unsettles making an effective portrayal of the chaos of war. Another film I'd compare this to is the Russian COME AND SEE, which follows a teenage boy whose village has been massacred by the Germans. It also works in terms of disorienting the viewer, building into a climax, with a character who is not goal directed but functions more as a figure through which we bear witness. Johnny Mad Dog works in the same way - most impact as the credits roll, accompanied by a series of photographs taken during the Liberian civil war of 1990 - 2003. The film has drawn on those images, recreating them on the screen and enabling us to bear witness.Sound...very little music and impressive use of sound. The opening scenes made all the more effective with the horror of events conveyed through screams. Dialogue is in pidgeon English, subtitled and has a raw authenticity to it, with English words put into African grammatical constructs, mixed with local dialects, or words put together to form new ones.Performances from the young cast are superb, with an utterly convincing blankness. The violence has a randomness and purposelesness to it. Shouting at their victims, randomly barking out irreverent questions such as 'what is the area of a triangle?' These kids can't be written off as 'evil' because they seem to lack any motivation. Dressed in bizarre clothes such as wedding dresses, sporting headgear, fairy wings, in a strange way they've adapted to a set of circumstances and through the violence have formed their own surrogate family. I think the best sense to make of this is through mental health and the idea of a collective psychopathy which maintains it own awful momentum.Violence is all the more shocking in the way the director avoids cinematic conventions. There isn't a build up to someone being shot: one moment the boys are 'patrolling' a street, the next moment one drops to the ground, hit by a sniper. The treatment is very matter of fact, shocking for the banality, the casual nature of the violence.Challenging, chilling, disturbing, harrowing and difficult to watch. Time will tell but I think this may well, eventually, be seen as one of the 'great' war films. I can't think of another which deals in the same way so effectively with child soldiersThere are no heroes here, no resolution, ultimately it points up the complete futility and waste of all wars.