Johnny Mad Dog (2008)

79% of critics liked it
(24 reviews)
61% of users liked it
(8,642 ratings)

A vicious child soldier armed with weapons of death and willing to use them at the slightest provocation serves as the focal point for this drama highlighting the need for greater humanity in a country ravaged by absurd wars. Johnny is a fifteen year old soldier with a small commando unit, and… More A vicious child soldier armed with weapons of death and willing to use them at the slightest provocation serves as the focal point for this drama highlighting the need for greater humanity in a country ravaged by absurd wars. Johnny is a fifteen year old soldier with a small commando unit, and together this team robs, pillages, and kills everyone and everything in their path. Laokolé is a sixteen year old girl who spirits her disabled father around on a ramshackle wheelbarrow and looks after her eight year old brother Fofo while dreaming of ways to leave the city and build a better future. As Johnny advances and Laokolé falls back, miniature warlords leading diminutive armies kill each other over such trivialities as misplaced words or television sets. What will it take to ensure that no more childhoods are cut tragically short? ~ Jason Buchanan, Rovi

Play Trailer

Rating, Runtime: Unrated, 1 hr. 33 min.
Directed By: Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire
Genres: Art House & International, Drama

In Theaters: Jan 21, 2011 Limited
Studio: MNP Entreprise

Critic Reviews

V.A. Musetto, New York Post
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.
Nick Pinkerton, Village Voice
Sauvaire, hesitating between a protest picture and a glam-squalid imagist orgy, only succeeds in scattering human rubble across the screen.
Wesley Morris, Boston Globe
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.
Justin Chang, Variety
A fearsome plunge into the world of child soldiers in present-day West Africa.
Manohla Dargis, New York Times
Johnny Mad Dog is an assaultive fiction about Liberian child soldiers.
Clay Cane, BET.com
Educational, truthful and important.
Joseph Jon Lanthier, Slant Magazine
Director Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire's deftly stylized camerawork reminds us at key intervals that what we're seeing is artifice, dramatization.
Eric Monder, Film Journal International
...it's difficult to recommend Johnny Mad Dog, despite-and in some ways because of-the fact it is very good.
Christopher Null, Filmcritic.com
breathless, ferocious, and deeply unsettling
Cosmo Landesman, Times [UK]
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.
Philip French, Observer [UK]
A gut-wrenching, documentary-style look at a company of Kalashnikov-wielding kids.
David Edwards, Daily Mirror [UK]
Never letting up for a moment, you should go see - but prepare to be shocked.
Rich Cline, Shadows on the Wall
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.
David Jenkins, Time Out
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.
Kevin Maher, Times [UK]
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.
Peter Bradshaw, Guardian [UK]
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.
, Daily Telegraph
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.
Derek Malcolm, This is London
The film has an immediate power no one could deny.
, Daily Mail [UK]
This small, uncompromising masterpiece stands out in especially stark but refreshing relief.
Leo Robson, Financial Times
The film is swift and gripping but rarely flashy or titillating; sympathetic to its anti-heroes without ever slighting their victims.

Read all 22 critic reviews

Critic ratings and reviews powered by RottenTomatoes.com

Fresh (60% or more critics rated the movie positively)

Rotten (59% or fewer critics rated the movie positively)

Featured Audience Ratings

Gordon A

Powerful insight into the psyche of child soldiers with a mesmerising central performance and a real driving energy but shrouded in the darkness of the subject material.