Synopsis
PK, an English orphan terrorized for his family's political beliefs in Africa, turns to his only friend, a kindly world-wise prisoner, Geel Piet. Geel teaches him how to box with the motto “fight with your fists and lead with your heart”. As he grows to manhood, PK uses these words to take on the system and the injustices he sees around him - and finds that one person really can make a difference.
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Cast
- Morgan FreemanGeel Piet
- Stephen DorffP.K. Age 18
- Simon FentonP.K. Age 12
- Guy WitcherP.K. Age 7
- Armin Mueller-StahlDoc
- Alois MoyoGideon Duma
- Marius WeyersProf. Daniel Marais
- Ian RobertsHoppie Gruenewald
- Fay MastersonMaria
- Winston NtshonaMlungisi
Recommendations
- 70
Variety
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. - 63
Chicago Sun-Times
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? - 60
Empire
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. - 50
Los Angeles Times
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. - 50
Washington Post
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. - 50
Orlando Sentinel
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. - 30
The New York Times
The film's facile treatment of racial issues may be enough to bring back the practice of throwing tomatoes at the screen. - 30
Rolling Stone
A violent cartoon that trivializes apartheid. If there's any justice, the birds of loneliness will be circling the box office.
