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Johnny Mad Dog (2008)

12 (FR) | France, Belgium, Liberia | Kru languages, English | 98 min

Directed by: Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire

6.7

Johnny Mad Dog, maybe 15, leads a band of boy soldiers in a civil war in an unnamed African country. "Don't want to die? Don't be born" is one of their shouted mottoes. We follow Mad Dog and his crew - No Good Advice, Butterfly, Chicken Hair, and others - as they kill, pillage rape, interrogate, and terrorize on their march to the capital. They take a TV station and lead an assault on the President's residence. We also follow Laokole, about Johnny age, as she tries to hold together her family of brother and disabled father. Is there more than chaos and inhumanity here? At war since age 10, has Johnny anything inside?

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Cast & Crew

Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire

Director

Christophe Minie

Johnny Mad Dog

Daisy Victoria Vandy

Laokole

Joseph Duo

Never Die

Dagbeth Tweh

No Good Advice

Careen Moore

Fatmata - Lovelita

Videos (1)

Johnny Mad Dog-Trailer

Trailer

Release Date

France

(Cannes Film Festival)

2008-05-20

(BFI London Film Festival)

2008-10-24

France

No data

2008-11-26

Also Known As (A.K.A.)

Johnny Mad Dog

(Original title)

Johnny Mad Dog

Australia

Johnny Mad Dog

Ecuador

Parent Guide

The extent of the violence consists of men, women and children suffering gunshot wounds, usually to the chest or shoulder, via rifles fired by men or boys; and a woman being raped by a teenage boy and a younger boy. Overall extremely violent but not very gory.

One teenage boy can be seen being struck in the head by a fired bullet, and a small jet of blood flowing out of the gunshot wound. This is very brief and may be the only cranial gunshot wound in the movie.

In a scene early on, a child is forced to gun down his parents.

Part of the end credits sequence is upon the backdrop of a slide show of documentary photographs of child combatants, violent festivities and some atrocities, including a photograph of a slain woman and infant, and a photograph of a severed head situated in the middle of a street.

Throughout the movie, the child troops exhibit extreme intimidation and mild brutality toward men, women and children who are outnumbered and unarmed, interrogating the victims and sometimes summarily gunning them down. In one instance, the victim is a child with his hands bound behind his back, and he winds up being gunned down while running away, trying to escape.

A young girl uses the stock of the rifle she managed to take from a teenage boy to strike him in the head multiple times, causing him to bleed, and then she points the muzzle at him.

Shootouts, ambushes and raids, all of the homicidal vein, involving youth and grownups, are depicted. These battles/operations don't end until no more opponents are left alive.

A pig, bound at the snout and legs, is carried around for a while before being shot to death, out of frame, by one of the boys. Later, the pig's severed head, impaled on a stick, can be seen roasted upon a campfire and then chewed upon by one of the boys.

In multiple scenes, a loaded rocket-propelled grenade launcher can be seen among the child combatants or carried by one of them, and in one scene, a teenage boy fires the ordinance at an enemy-occupied building, striking and detonating part of the structure.

The child combatants often behave more like dacoits, pirates, bandits and outlaws than troops or militia. As a team, they hunt down and terminate guerilla fighters as well as unarmed civilians, before looting the spoils of war as compensation for being sent on their missions to begin with.

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