The Power of One

The best thing about The Power of One is that it works as a history lesson. Avildsen and his writer, Robert Mark Kamen, have managed to simplify and sort out the players and their points of view in a way no other film about South Africa has done. It makes painfully clear just how deep the problems run, and how their solution will invariably require an almost evolutionary change in everyone. [27 March 1992]

On the one hand a captivating and inspiring tale of a boy's journey to courage amid searing injustice, pic often gives way to scenes of intense violence that are likely to bludgeon the very sensibilities it seeks to awaken. Read full review

How can you forgive a movie that begins by asking you to care who will win freedom, and ends by asking you to care who will win a fight? Read full review

Avildsen does a good job with all of these actors, and his re-creation of 1930s/1940s South Africa on sets in Zimbabwe and Botswana is convincing; his handling of squalor in the townships is particularly detailed and vivid. It's the best work he's done since winning the Oscar for the first "Rocky." But because of the script's shortcomings the result is only half of a good movie. [27 March 1992, p.22]

It would have taken another director (the late David Lean, for instance) and a better script to make this movie into the serious, full-blooded epic it wants to be. But Power of One succeeds in entertaining and getting audiences to think about the tragedy of apartheid; flaws and all, it's still worth seeing. [31 March 1992, p.E6]

Crude, patronising and mawkish, but rescued by excellent performances, beautiful landscape photography, and hard-to-argue-with themes of natural justice, delivered with a punch. Read full review

Avildsen draws good performances from the three actors who play PK, as well as from the ever-reliable Freeman and Müller-Stahl, but subtlety is abandoned when he focuses on the ring and teen romance. The climax is a slugging match between PK and a former school bully which would make Rocky proud. Read full review

Seeing a movie that doesn’t know the meaning of shameless, that refuses to worry about plausibility, that acts as if subtlety hadn’t been invented yet, does have a very basic kind of intrinsically cinematic pull. Read full review

An absorbing but awkward union of the two-fisted boxing movie with the moist-eyed British memoir...Though rife with worthy intentions and great notions, this populist safari manages to be both patronizing and manipulative. Read full review

Reducing the racist characters to the level of frothing-at-the-mouth Karate Kid villains doesn't shed much light on a serious social problem. (Louis Malle's portrait of the young Gestapo member in the 1974 Lacombe, Lucien came much closer to exposing the banality of evil.) And Avildsen doesn't make matters any better by staging scenes of racial violence so luridly that they almost amount to a form of exploitation. Read full review

The Power of One emerges as a broadly painted piece of rhetoric. It means well and has an undeniable dramatic pull, but its relegation of blacks to the sidelines and its creation of a white savior are unforgivable. [10 Apr 1992, p.10]

The Power of One plays like a plot-heavy South African fairy tale with one too many big, bad wolves. [27 March 1992, p.4D]

Despite promising opening sequences and some above-average performances from a trio of young actors, the film's points become more elusive as its technique becomes more blunt. [16 March 1992]

IF SINCERITY were the basis on which movies were judged, The Power of One would be a great one. But real movies, like real life, have to provide satisfaction over a wider range, and this long, dry, coming-of-age tale about South Africa falls short. [29 March 1992, p.12C]

A film that turns the savagery of apartheid into a crisis of conscience for one relatively privileged white boy. Worse yet, it suggests that his crisis is a matter of urgent concern for countless South African blacks. [9 Oct 1992, p.11]

It's resounding bunk, candied over with the lush music of Johnny Clegg and hyped to death by director John ("Rocky") Avildsen. Read full review

An earnest, ponderous epic that tries desperately to say Something Important about disenfranchised blacks and their Afrikaans oppressors, but never does. [27 March 1992, p.D7]

The film's facile treatment of racial issues may be enough to bring back the practice of throwing tomatoes at the screen. Read full review

A violent cartoon that trivializes apartheid. If there's any justice, the birds of loneliness will be circling the box office. Read full review

The Power of One spends so much screen time reveling in the eloquence and bravery of its hero and depicting South Africa’s blacks as an anonymous horde of victims that the film, in effect, becomes their victimizer. Read full review

With last week's elections in South Africa finally pointing the way toward a dismantlement of apartheid, it can't be said that the timing of "The Power of One" is particularly astute. But this is a film with no particular relationship to the real world in any case. [27 March 1992, p.M]

Avildsen is a master at pulling populist heartstrings, Johnny Clegg provides the African music which is so essential to the movie's plot and the panoramic shots of the veldt are frequently breathtaking. But these things alone do not a good movie make. Read full review