Stander

A white South African cop uses his insider’s knowledge to pull off a series of bank robberies, a stiff jail sentence proving little deterrent when he continues his crime spree in this slick retelling of events which made captain Andre Stander something of a folk-hero. The movie’s hot on squealing tyres and shoot-outs, boosted by a smokin’ David Holmes score, but Jane’s strutting central turn can’t quite bring off Hughes’s ambitious attempt to cast the protagonist as an icon of resistance to the apartheid regime, who’s sickened by the police violence during the massacre of black protesters. It works better as a funky crime flick with a hint of conscience, and lots of cherishably grisly ’70s architecture and interiors.