One man’s fight against every man’s temptation

Cast: S’Dumo Mtshali, Presley Chweneyagae, Israel Makoe, Owen Sejaka, Harriet Gavshon, Tom Marias, Mariki Van, Der Walt, Osborne Zulu, Deurel Rabbe, Thapelo Maloi, Vukile Lekubu, Sydney Molole
Writer and Director: Donovan Marsh
Cinema: Eastgate
Running Time: 106 minutes
Type of film: Gangsters vs Police
Age restriction: 16
Film : “Number, Number!”
Reviewed by Joel White

Perhaps the first, and most important thing, to say of this film, It is the most engrossing film I have seen in at least 10 years!
I defy anyone to get up and leave before the end of this one!

Made entirely in South Africa, with the writer/director and entire cast made up of previously unknown South Africans. Everyone in the cast, at one or another point in this totally absorbing storyline, changes sides, sometime more than once.

We start with a couple of dissatisfied police officers (are there any other kind) who decide(after lengthy hemming and hawing) to cast in their lot worth prospective bank robbers.

The sum, we are told, seems to me untemptingly low at R3 million.
The money is to be snatched while it is en-route, guarded by two officers.

In their planning, we see it is fully their intention to murder the guards.
Perhaps most interesting- and most unusual for a bank robbing film-is the film’s willingness to allow us to get to know the background, and even the foreground, of the villains.

Everyone has “a story to tell” and in their ordinariness we are led to wonder if it is possible-even likely- that, under similar negative-even hostile-surroundings we might all be led down the road of temptation.

The killing-in the event-does not go as smoothly as planned or hoped for. The actual robbing of the bank van, holding three employees, does NOT go smoothly at all.

The audience- from one moment to the next-are kept on tenter hooks (and on edge of our seats).
The murder of the driver and the bank’s two security guards is- as one might expect- surprisingly not the end of the danger always facing robbers. We are confronted with the decision, finally made and adhered to, by the two wavering accomplices.

One niggling abjection.
With the robbery actually taking place on the open, main highway, is it likely that a ten minute robbery can take place with not a single passing motor car in sight?