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27 out of 32 people found the following comment useful :-
Furious, vital and breathtakingly intense, 10 August 2008
9/10
Author: tclark-5 from Melbourne, Australia

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

What a gift (though a painful one) to have caught Johnny Mad Dog at a Melbourne Film Festival screening yesterday. The audience was left breathless by this confronting and brutal film. From the first frame, director Jean-Stephane Sauvaire's adaptation of Emmanuel Dongala's novel held the audience captive with its visceral depiction of the lives of two children (though it's sometimes hard to remember that's what they really are) caught up in the careless tornado of civil war.

Reminiscent in style and tone of Fernando Meirelles' Cidade de Deus (City of God), the film follows Johnny Mad Dog, a 15-year-old soldier fighting raging hormones and the overpowering effects of systematic brainwashing, and Laokole, a 13-year-old girl fighting to save her crippled father and little brother.

The story is relatively simple, but the sense of danger and horror is always palpable, making it impossible to look away even when faced with scenes of depraved and unconscionable (though only occasionally graphic) violence. This violence feels justifiable, though, in the context of the closing montage, which shows graphically just how widespread and damaging the problem of child soldier recruitment really is. Sauvaire deliberately makes the geographical setting ambiguous, so it could be a story taking place in any number of countries, as it actually is.

It's obvious that Sauvaire and his cast of non-professional actors, many of whom brought to the film first-hand experience of the horrors of child soldier combat, have a driving urge to tell this story, to expose the truth about the consequences of involving children in violence, and the shocking hypocrisy when they are dumped, uncared for, at war's end.

There is nothing sanitised about Sauvaire's depiction of this hopeless situation; it is not for the faint-hearted. But it is a film for those who are willing to be challenged and provoked by an exceptional piece of cinema and human storytelling.

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12 out of 15 people found the following comment useful :-
i have not seen in a VERY long time such a REALISTIC war-drama, 17 June 2009
10/10
Author: beregic (beregic@msn.com) from Canada

the other reviewer bellow sums everything up pretty much as i would do overall. i just have to add that i like this much more then "city of God" mostly because there is no over-the-top acting here and this is much more expressive from a realistic point of view. also the 2 or 3 war scenes are also very raw with realistic common sense military tactics.

but the strength of this movie comes from its subject matter as well as from ALL the actors. watching this one realizes that there is no need for drama classes to become an "actor" if you were able to "play" the designed "role" beforehand...hands down to ALL the actors here(both girls and boys). the dramatization and the conclusion also stands out as well as all those little details abundant in many scenes.the dialogs are very raw and used in good realistic measure as well.

one warning to the viewer: the language spoken is an English African dialect, so you might have a need for a subtitled version. subtitles are already available for it on the net.

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14 out of 19 people found the following comment useful :-
An incredible achievement in raw film-making., 14 June 2009
8/10
Author: Harry_High_Pants from Melbourne, Australia

Johnny Mad Dog hits you like a punch in the jaw straight from the opening shot, and doesn't let up the entire way. The film directed by Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire was for me the stand out film of the Melbourne International Film Festival in 2008. The raw, splendidly gritty film making technique displayed to the full house at the forum has left an image in my head that wont leave me for a long time.

The film depicts a group of soldiers in their early teens and the lives they lead as a gang of freedom fighters in an unnamed African country. Their country has been plagued by war for many years to the point there its all the young boys have ever known. It highlights the loss of innocence amongst the young boys and extreme dramatic realities of the civil situation in the country.

The film for me had some likenesses to Fernando Murielle's and Kátia Lund's 'City of God', as both deal with the corruption of young peoples lives in poverty stricken landscapes. While 'Johnny Mad Dog' doesn't quite hits the incredible heights of 'City of God', its by no means any less of a film. 'Johnny Mad Dog' hits you with more of a documentary feel, lots of hand-held camera, yet shot compositions are still carefully considered and beautifully realized. 'Johnny Mad Dog' does away with a lot of overly stylistic editing, which presents the events of the characters as a very truthful experience.

The performances are incredible. Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire, has shaped some amazing moments from a cast of non-actors. In the Q and A afterwards he explained his pre- production techniques and his unyielding intent on casting boys who had had actually been soldiers in their past. For this, the utmost respect is disserved for him.

Sauvaire's vision of this bleak situation doesn't hold back for a moment. It grabs the audience by the neck, and puts in the middle of the disorderly gang. I'm very glad I had the opportunity to experience it.

85/100

Harry High Pants.

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Bearing witness to appalling events, is this destined to become one of The great war films?, 10 November 2009
7/10
Author: trpuk1968 from United Kingdom

Covering the same territory as BLOOD DIAMOND this couldn't be further away from Hollywood's treatment of child soldiers. However, although sentimental and following the classical Hollywood patterns, BLOOD DIAMOND does have its merits. I'd also compare this with SAVING PRIVATE RYAN because there's a similar visceral realism, on a budget which was probably one percent of Spielberg's film.

This is difficult to watch from the opening scene onwards as the protagonists, boys from their early to late teens, commit the most appalling acts of depravity - such as forcing another child to shoot his father dead, raping a young woman. One of these acts is witnessed by a young girl, who Johnny Mad Dog is to face at the films denouement. The director overcomes his budget limitations with effective use of hand-held camera, close in, jerky, tightly edited, frequently with the look of actual documentary footage. Things are often obscured, you can't quite see whats going on, which further disorientates and unsettles making an effective portrayal of the chaos of war. Another film I'd compare this to is the Russian COME AND SEE, which follows a teenage boy whose village has been massacred by the Germans. It also works in terms of disorienting the viewer, building into a climax, with a character who is not goal directed but functions more as a figure through which we bear witness. Johnny Mad Dog works in the same way - most impact as the credits roll, accompanied by a series of photographs taken during the Liberian civil war of 1990 - 2003. The film has drawn on those images, recreating them on the screen and enabling us to bear witness.

Sound...very little music and impressive use of sound. The opening scenes made all the more effective with the horror of events conveyed through screams. Dialogue is in pidgeon English, subtitled and has a raw authenticity to it, with English words put into African grammatical constructs, mixed with local dialects, or words put together to form new ones.

Performances from the young cast are superb, with an utterly convincing blankness. The violence has a randomness and purposelesness to it. Shouting at their victims, randomly barking out irreverent questions such as 'what is the area of a triangle?' These kids can't be written off as 'evil' because they seem to lack any motivation. Dressed in bizarre clothes such as wedding dresses, sporting headgear, fairy wings, in a strange way they've adapted to a set of circumstances and through the violence have formed their own surrogate family. I think the best sense to make of this is through mental health and the idea of a collective psychopathy which maintains it own awful momentum.

Violence is all the more shocking in the way the director avoids cinematic conventions. There isn't a build up to someone being shot: one moment the boys are 'patrolling' a street, the next moment one drops to the ground, hit by a sniper. The treatment is very matter of fact, shocking for the banality, the casual nature of the violence.

Challenging, chilling, disturbing, harrowing and difficult to watch. Time will tell but I think this may well, eventually, be seen as one of the 'great' war films. I can't think of another which deals in the same way so effectively with child soldiers

There are no heroes here, no resolution, ultimately it points up the complete futility and waste of all wars.

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8 out of 25 people found the following comment useful :-
Good acting but pointless and confusing, 12 July 2009
4/10
Author: lsdoxie from Sweden

Johnny Mad Dog is a war drama in an unknown African country. The movie follows a group of African rebel soldiers that plunder and murder civilians.

To make a good summary of the movie, it's 90 minutes of African rebels harassing and shooting civilians with their AK47's. We are given a shaky camera and A LOT of close ups which is confusing since you don't really know what's going on. It ends very abruptly and leaves you with a lot of questions.

No characters to care for and no logic. You feel no sympathy for the main character this "Johnny Mad Dog". You just want him to die.

I don't know what Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire wanted to say with this movie, and to tell you the truth, you're not missing anything if you don't see it.

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