"The Power of One" is noble in its attempts to show the evils of apartheid in South Africa and to give it a historical context. But the film ultimately fails because its point of view is flawed, its story is all over the map and in the end it settles for a "Rocky" or "Karate Kid"-style fantasy.
That shouldn't be a big surprise, since "The Power of One" was directed by John Avildsen, who helmed the first "Rocky," as well as the "Karate Kid" trilogy, and was written by Robert Mark Kamen, who wrote the first two "Karate Kid" pictures.The first half of "The Power of One" is very good - and if that story had been expanded and the second half dropped, "The Power of One" might be a much better film.
Narrated by the central character, the film begins in the 1930s with young PK (played initially by charming Guy Witcher), a white English boy living on a draught-ridden farm in South Africa with his widowed mother and his black "nanny," whose son is his best friend.
Because they are poor and his mother is in failing health, PK is sent to an all-white prep school, where he is brutalized by his classmates, Afrikaners who resent the English. Their leader is a Nazi youth who will, of course, resurface later in the film.
Eventually, after PK's mother dies, the boy finds himself living with a gentlemanly, educated German named Doc (Armin Mueller-Stahl), who raises cacti. But when the war breaks out, Doc is interred in a prison camp because of his nationality.
There, PK meets Geel Piet (Morgan Freeman), an inmate who teaches him boxing. He also learns piano from Doc and begins to understand what is going on around him. (In the latter scenes, PK is played by Simon Fenton.)
Up to this point, the film is quite enthralling, and Mueller-Stahl and Freeman, superb actors both, manage to do much with their characters and give the entire film quite a lift.
But at about the halfway mark, PK leaves the prison and Mueller-Stahl and Freeman leave the film, and "The Power of One" never quite recovers.
The rest of the film has PK (now played by Stephen Dorff) joining an underground boxing circuit, which unlawfully mixes white and black boxers. He has applied for a scholarship to Oxford, but meanwhile joins in the fight against apartheid and, as fate would have it, falls in love with the daughter of the government official who is enforcing apartheid.
These scenes are bolstered somewhat by the presence of John Gielgud as PK's schoolmaster and spunky Fay Masterson as his girlfriend, but Director Avildsen has little in mind aside from boxing matches and superficial platitudes.
Avildsen also misses no opportunity for vividly portraying brutality on the screen, from the early scenes that show PK being terrorized by his classmates to later scenes of white police beating poor black villagers. Some of this violence is so extreme that it strains the PG-13 rating to the max. (There are also a couple of profanities toward the end of the film.)
"The Power of One" has the makings of an interesting story, but it shoots for too much and, as a result, achieves too little.