“You are the white Mandela,” says a ham-faced warden, all but spitting in the face of anti-apartheid activist Tim Jenkin upon his arrival at Pretoria Local Prison in 1978.
It’s not intended as a compliment: “The most deluded of them all,” the warden adds, lest it be taken as such.
As clunkily deployed in the script for “Escape from Pretoria,” however, the line acts as a shortcut to nobility, in a tight genre exercise that has scant time for such elaborate niceties as character development and social context.
Adapted from Jenkin’s memoir of his time served — and resourcefully cut short — as a South African political prisoner in the country’s darkest days of white supremacy, Francis Annan’s film works effectively as a straight-up jailbreak thriller, well-oiled in greasy B-movie tradition.
It’s when it shoots for more historical import that it falls somewhat short.Jenkin’s book of
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