Film: The Silent Army
Release date: 19th November 2010
Certificate: 15
Running time: 93 mins
Director: Jean Van de Velde
Starring: Marco Borsato, Abby Mukiibi Nkaaga, Andrew Kintu, Thekla Reuten, Jacqueline Blom
Genre: Action/Drama
Studio: High Fliers
Format: Cinema
Country: Netherlands
In the heart of the African jungle, an ever-growing army of child-soldiers are on the rampage. As the trail of slaughter grows, it’s up to our hero to rescue the brain-washed children and put an end to the bloodshed.
We begin by following Abu, a child who is dragged from his home by The Holy Army and quickly indoctrinated to a life of militaristic murder. The leader of the army insists that the children call him Daddy, and isn’t above forcing his disciples to kill their own parents or provide him with sexual pleasure. Soon Abu is helping to plant land-mines, massacre other villages, and kill his friends.
In the meantime, Eduard Zuiderwijk, a white cook, is trying to recover from the death of his wife. When his son begins investigating the loss of his missing friend, Abu, the two begin a journey to find him. This takes them to a refugee camp where Eduard finally decides to go and find the rebel army himself and bargain for Abu’s release.
Deep in the mountains, the rebel-leader has arranged to pick up more ammunition, and soon the scene is set for a gun-blazing, action-packed finale which will test the children’s loyalty to their new ‘Daddy’…
The first thing that strikes you about The Silent Army is its pacing. The first half-hour is like watching a film in fast-forward. The average shot is less than ten seconds long, which makes it difficult to be bored, but even harder to care. Eduard’s wife is killed in a car-crash six minutes into the film, by the half hour mark Abu’s entire family are dead, Eduard has travelled half way across Africa and the audience are left struggling to keep up. It could be argued that the film is placing us in the children’s mind-frame. The situation these children are put in is illogical, frenzied and horrid. But cinematically this pacing is un-engaging. We cannot be expected to mourn the passing of a character who we have barely been introduced to. Characters need to earn our sympathy, our respect. In the absence of any real characterisation, or dramatic tension, all we are left with is a series of war-crime re-enactments, filmed with all the frantic editing and cold precision of a music video.
When the film finally does begin to slow-down, it simply falls apart. Ignoring the glaring plot-holes, self-important lecturing characters are given no emotional justification for their actions. It is never explained, why Eduard decides to take on an army of dangerous gun-touting rebels, or, for that matter what it is that the rebels are hoping to achieve. The leader, Michael Obeke, seems aimless and pantomimic. The female aids-worker we meet at the midway point serves no real dramatic purpose - by the end it never becomes clear what the film is actually trying to achieve.
The finale finds our hero take on the guise of the ‘Hollywood vigilante’, using weaponry to blow his enemies to pieces, and ends with a credit sequence urging us to do our bit to help the plight of real child-soldiers. Yet the film makes every effort to tell us that charity, good-will and ‘white moral-superiority’ are not the answers. The only thing that seems to work is a semi-automatic and a crate of grenades.
What we are left with is a sense of bewilderment. The only thing that achieves any semblance of emotional response is the violence against children. What The Silent Army doesn’t realise is that the reason why films like City Of God are so effective is because we are allowed time to get to know the victims of such violence. Here violence is a means to an end. We have no sense of what has been lost. We are left with a sub-standard action movie in which the answers to all of life’s problems are found at the end of a white-man’s gun.
An exploitative action movie that uses the pain of others to hide its own vacuous nature. AC
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