Jean-Stéphane
Sauvaire's Johnny Mad Dog played at the 2009
Vue d'Afrique Film Festival.
Johnny
Mad Dog, directed by Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire, doesn't
waste any time in plunging the audience right into its world.
The opening moments are brutal and intense. An African village
is under attack from marauding soldiers, but these attacking
forces are just kids, some of whom are brandishing guns almost
as big as they are. The leader of the platoon is a teenager
who goes by the name of Johnny Mad Dog (Christopher Minie),
and along with his right-hand man, the self-aggrandizing No
Good Advice (Dagbe Tweh), he leads them into ever more violent
encounters in the hunt for government sympathizers. This raid
ends with a young local boy being forced to shoot his own
father, and then the troop launch an attack on a state-controlled
TV station, which climaxes with multiple murders and the rape
of a female news presenter.
It's
hard to watch such horrific acts being perpetrated by children,
who seem to have no moral qualms and no sense of remorse about
what they are doing. They have been brainwashed by their commanders,
who feed them drugs and propaganda, but it's clear that these
kids don't understand the war they are fighting: at one point,
a speech from Martin Luther King can be heard on a radio;
the boys 
believe
it is the President. Director Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire
compounds this sense of unease by shooting Johnny Mad
Dog in a restless and nervy handheld style, forcing us
to get closer to the action, an effect which proves to be
a double-edged sword. There's no question about the film's
authenticity. Sauvaire shot the film in Liberia,
and a number of his cast members experienced events similar
to those depicted in the film during the country's two recent
civil wars. But the director's determination to give us a
raw, unflinching account of a conflict waged by teenagers
eventually stalls. After sitting through scene after scene
of kids shouting at and killing each other, the relentless
cacophony inevitably produces a numbing effect.
Some
respite is offered by the film's parallel narrative, which
follows 16-year-old Laokolé (Daisy 
Victoria
Vandy) as she tries to protect her younger brother and disabled
father, transporting them to a UN hospital while avoiding
the bloodshed in the streets. She embodies a sense of goodwill
and calm that is alien to Johnny Mad Dog and his crew, but
her scenes never come to life, partly because Vandy is a limited
actress, and the unceasing savagery of the film overwhelms
her personal story.
As
impressive as Sauvaire's depiction of events is, and as convincing
as many of the young actors are, I wondered whether there
was anything substantial behind the sound and the fury. Fortunately,
there are moments in the film's latter stages, when Johnny
and his fellow soldiers let their masks slip. For all of the
brilliantly realized carnage in Johnny Mad Dog, it
is these moments that are the most vivid, the moments when
we see them for what they really are: lost, confused, and
nothing more than children.
