Review of Africa

Africa (I) (1999)
Definitely in Contention for Dumbest Movie of the Year
24 May 2004
A blonde fashion model -- not Charlize Theron -- is on a location shoot with her boyfriend and his crew in South Africa. They have a row. She decides to join him at another location by driving her car across the savanna. She almost has an accident with a truck and her car leaves the highway and flips over. The truck driver evidently has paid no attention because she comes to later lying alone next to her car. She staggers to her feet, wearing a skimpy blouse, a virtual skirt, and a pair of heels. The highway can't be more than twenty feet away. So she smoothes her hair back away from the rather becoming bruise on her forehead and decides to start walking off into the trackless veldt. Mistake number one.

The rest of this interminable thing consists of three basic parts. (1) She keeps walking away from the highway getting punctured by thorns and tracked by lionesses and monkeys. (2) Flashbacks to the more comfortable moments she spent with her boyfriend. (3) Her boyfriend being joined by her parents and searching for her. They don't find her but it doesn't matter because she keeps plodding along until she stumbles onto another busy highway, having acquired a very nice tan.

I don't know why this movie was ever made. The performances are uniformly rudimentary, the plot mixed up and boring, the character development nonexistent. None of that would matter much except that -- well, it doesn't matter what the heroine is doing -- falling into bushes, climbing trees, jumping off a cliff -- she always manages to keep her knees together. Oh, there is a shot of her emerging nude from one of those pools at the foot of a waterfall, but one ten-second shot does not a summer idyll make. And I guess you DO get to see zebras, monkeys, lions, hyenas, and a dead eland (which she eats part of). She eats a grub worm too, come to think of it, and drinks muddy water from a small pond that elephants have just used as a bathtub. The most unkindest drink of all. The Yir Yuront of Queensland in Australia consider witchety grubs a delicacy so I don't know what she's complaining about.

I won't bother going on about this. You have better things to do with your time than watch this. If not, you might consider macrame. Or try the London Times crossword. They tend to be very hard. Here's an example. Name a major seaport in the middle of Czechoslovakia. Answer: "Oslo." CzechOSLOvakia -- get it?
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