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The Power of One

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Australia, France, United States · 1992
Rated PG-13 · 2h 7m
Director John G. Avildsen
Starring Morgan Freeman, Stephen Dorff, Simon Fenton, Guy Witcher
Genre Drama

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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What are critics saying?

70

Variety by

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.

60

Empire by Angie Errigo

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

Orlando Sentinel by Jay Boyar

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.

50

Los Angeles Times by Kenneth Turan

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.

20

Austin Chronicle by Marjorie Baumgarten

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.

25

Entertainment Weekly by Owen Gleiberman

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.

30

Rolling Stone by Peter Travers

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

50

Washington Post by Rita Kempley

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.

63

Chicago Sun-Times by Roger Ebert

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?

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