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Johnny Mad Dog Reviews
Fortune cookie wisdom from the nihilism brigade.
| Original Score: 2/5 | Jun 19, 2023
Director Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire's deftly stylized camerawork reminds us at key intervals that what we're seeing is artifice, dramatization.
| Original Score: 3/4 | Jan 22, 2011
...it's difficult to recommend Johnny Mad Dog, despite-and in some ways because of-the fact it is very good.
| Jan 21, 2011
The movie is harrowing and hard to forget. But just when you think there's no hope, Sauvaire throws in a tearful moment of redemption.
| Original Score: 3/4 | Jan 21, 2011
breathless, ferocious, and deeply unsettling
Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jan 20, 2011
Sauvaire, hesitating between a protest picture and a glam-squalid imagist orgy, only succeeds in scattering human rubble across the screen.
Full Review | Jan 18, 2011
Basically, talented French director Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire has too much style on his hands. His film isn't as amorally grandiose as City of God. Nor does it achieve the hulking tragedy of Gomorrah.
| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Nov 4, 2010
What end does a harrowing and horrifying film like this serve? Understanding? Political awareness? I'm not sure. One thing is certain: you won't forget it in a hurry.
| Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 30, 2009
A gut-wrenching, documentary-style look at a company of Kalashnikov-wielding kids.
| Oct 30, 2009
Never letting up for a moment, you should go see - but prepare to be shocked.
| Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 30, 2009
Harrowing, violent and deeply disturbing, this realistic drama about children fighting in Liberia's grisly civil war (1999-2003) is not only a strong story, but it has wide resonance as a look at young people living without limits.
| Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 28, 2009
The film sees war as a deadener of moral and physical inhibition, a paradoxical state where there are no winners or losers, just the living and the dead. Stunning.
| Original Score: 5/5 | Oct 23, 2009
There is an odd whiff of post-colonial bongo-bongo about it - i.e. sit back, munch popcorn and watch the natives blow holes in each other.
| Original Score: 2/5 | Oct 23, 2009
War is brutalising, infantilising, dehumanising, requiring the unquestioning submission to authority. All soldiers are child soldiers: that is the bitterly cynical nightmare that Sauvaire's film insists upon to the very end.
| Original Score: 5/5 | Oct 23, 2009
Imagine an African Lord of the Flies pulled off with the jittery expertise of The Hurt Locker, and you're only some of the way to grasping what's in store in Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire's Johnny Mad Dog.
| Original Score: 5/5 | Oct 23, 2009
The film has an immediate power no one could deny.
Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 23, 2009
This small, uncompromising masterpiece stands out in especially stark but refreshing relief.
| Original Score: 5/5 | Oct 23, 2009
The film is swift and gripping but rarely flashy or titillating; sympathetic to its anti-heroes without ever slighting their victims.
| Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 23, 2009
A brutal, blood-soaked film that feels like a primal scream.
| Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 23, 2009