Director: Zola Maseko
Starring: Taye Diggs, Tumisho Masha, Moshidi Motshegwa, Fezile Mpela, Keketso Semoko

- Reviewed by Vickie

Oh, for the love of cinema, WHY must actors mangle accents so badly? It's unbelievably distracting and completely detracts from the action onscreen. Both Taye Diggs and Gabriel Mann are guilty of accent mangling in this somewhat compelling, if uneven, real-life drama.

Directed by Zola Maseko, the film tells the story of writer Henry Nxumalo (Diggs), who worked for renegade South African magazine Drum in the early-1950s. Initially a reporter covering sporting events and social news, Henry is soon investigating political wrong-doings amid the looming glare of apartheid. Needless to say, the government is none too pleased with his exposés, and Henry's life and work are soon in grave danger. Jim Bailey (Jason Flemyng), the magazine's British editor, is reluctantly behind Henry's efforts, eager to shake up the establishment but wary of the consequences. And Jurgen (Mann), the resident photographer, is an equally eager participant in the covert journalistic missions, camera always at the ready to capture drama on film.

It's hard to fault a film with noble intentions and earnest efforts, but Drum left me unsatisfied. The first two thirds of the film are erratic and serve only to set up the far, far superior final third, where tensions rise and the previously seeming-disjointed pieces fall into place. But there are many questions that go unanswered, especially at the end. In my opinion, this is the kind of film that needs one of those "this is what happened next." text explanations onscreen just before the credits. The kind that update the lives of the characters or tell the audience the ramifications of what transpired in the film. What happened to Drum magazine? Its staff? The legacy Nxumalo left behind? His impact? Anything?

The beginning is equally vague, and I understand the constraints of telling a man's story in two hours or less, but a little more exposition might have helped. Who is Henry Nxumalo? How did he get to Drum? The film was penned by Jason Filardi, whose last effort was the Steve Martin/Queen Latifah comedy Bringing Down the House, so that might explain the glossed-over aspect of the story, but surely someone somewhere could have dropped in a couple more scenes.

And while that someone was at it, they should have fired the dialect coach. I'm not sure which is worse, Taye Diggs' horrible South African accent or Gabriel Mann's abysmal attempt at sounding German. Awful! Diggs' accent veers back and forth between Jamaican, Guyanese, British, American South and none at all. And Mann mistakenly believes that Germany must be a suburb of Moscow, because his character spends a great deal of time spewing dialogue in a decidedly Russian way. That's when he's not speaking completely accent-free, though. It was super-annoying - if they couldn't get the accents right or at least keep them consistently wrong (pick a country and go with it!), why bother?

Drum is a film that's meant to expose audiences to the life of a writer many have probably never heard of, and it succeeds to some extent. It merits viewing, I suppose, but pales in comparisons to any number of apartheid-related films that came before it.

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