GamesRadar+ Verdict
Part war story, part endurance test, this harrowing portrait of a young boy’s loss of innocence is gripping, gruelling, grown-up fare. That said, some judicious trimming wouldn’t have hurt.
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Machetes kill…
Netflix’s first foray into feature film distribution is no easy sell: a lengthy, bloody chronicle of one child soldier’s dehumanisation, shot in Ghana with only one star name propping up a cast of novices and unknowns.
Obliged to play Oliver to this diabolical Fagin, Agu soon learns to hack, shoot and slaughter, winning not only the respect of his manipulative mentor but also the friendship of one of his fellow recruits (a mute yet expressive Emmanuel Nii Adom Quaye). With each fresh trauma, though, a little less soul remains, something Attah poignantly conveys even as Agu devolves into a stone-faced, battle-scarred automaton.
Elba, for his part, is fiercely compelling in a role that could almost be the demonic flipside to the benign leader he played in Mandela, especially in later scenes that see the Commandant rebel against his ‘supreme commander’ (Jude Akuwudike) and take off on his own like some latter-day Colonel Kurtz.
It could be argued, however, that Fukunaga makes his job easier by downplaying the sexual abuse of his charges that was explicit in Iweala’s original: an odd bit of censorship in a film that has no qualms about showing its other lead cleaving a defenceless man to pieces or blowing a woman’s brains out mid-rape.
Such scenes pack a knockout punch made all the more visceral by Fukunaga’s own handheld camerawork, the Sin Nombre director placing us right in the crosshairs of a conflict that we, like Agu, can only vaguely comprehend. We may not end up with his PTSD, but we certainly emerge both battered and chastened.
