The Bang Bang Club Trailer: War Is Hell (and Handsome)

The South African accent is sorely underrepresented on film, and that’s a shame: When acted accurately, it’s musical and exotic, though when someone has trouble with the dialect, it can sound a little like the bad actor in your improv class toggling vainly between British and Australian. In The Bang Bang Club, Ryan Phillippe, Taylor Kitsch, and Malin Akerman each try their hand at it, and it’s a stretch for Phillippe in other ways, as he gets to play lead again after a run of frequent supporting parts (most recently in The Lincoln Lawyer). Here, Phillippe and Kitsch play dazzlingly attractive war photographers whose photos of post-apartheid South Africa change attitudes, though they often run into resistance from their subjects, one of whom decries Phillippe’s efforts “a white man’s photo taken for white man’s purposes.” Call Phillippe miscast as a war photographer or inaccurate in his accent if you wish, but at least he’s got one aspect of that character nailed: They don’t come much whiter than Ryan Phillippe. [Rope of Silicon]

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7t8HLrayrnV6YvK57kWloamdgaHyjrc2glpuZnpyspLjUm5atqpGeuaa%2BjaGrpqQ%3D