Stander (2003): B-

“If you go fast enough, you can’t see where you’ve come from,” says a cohort of Andre Stander in Bronwen Hughes’ Stander, and it’s an outlook the notorious South African cop-turned-thief apparently held dear. Disgusted by his participation in the state-sanctioned murder of innocent blacks, Stander threw away a promising career in the police force for a reckless life of non-stop crime, looting over twenty banks in the 1970s while still on the job and another bushel after he broke out of prison. As played by Thomas Jane, Stander is a charismatic, carefree rebel who robbed banks as an act of protest against Apartheid, and Hughes gets great mileage out of her subject’s go-for-broke brazenness. What Stander lacked, however, was a genuinely subversive modus operandi – the man held up banks to spit in the face of his cruel white countrymen, but he was no Robin Hood, and with one trivial exception, he greedily kept the money for himself. Stander’s selfishness goes a long way toward negating the supposed nobility of his actions, and Bronwen’s film doesn’t help itself by using oppressed blacks as merely a device to provide Stander with some criminal motivation. Still, it’s a rather entertaining (if style-over-substance) portrait of insane illicitness.