Entertainment

The Bang Bang Club

Hero photographers cover the 1990s civil war in South Africa, while anonymous Africans suffer and die colorfully in the background in the strangely unbalanced drama “The Bang Bang Club.”

Ryan Phillippe plays a novice South African war photographer who befriends three others while covering the black-on-black war that erupted when Nelson Mandela was released from prison but his party’s Zulu opponents were being backed by the racist white government.

Phillippe’s character and the other hunks seem more like hindrances than windows into the war. The film is primarily a celebration of the smoking and joking of the four photographers and a newspaper photo editor (Malin Akerman) who dates one of them.

In a typical scene, Phillippe’s character is horrified to see a man burnt alive. Thirty seconds of screen time later, he’s babbling about F-stops and framing (as if we care), and a moment later he’s partying because his photos have been published all over the world. Everyone dashes around being rakish and feeding one another’s egos with lines like, “Can’t you at least pretend to be scared?”

Seldom does “The Bang Bang Club” show much interest in the big picture of South Africa. When moral issues do come to the forefront, the big worry seems to be not questionable behavior but bad publicity.