Shake Hands with the Devil

As the fourth film to deal with the Rwandan genocide in as many years, following previous Festival titles Hotel Rwanda, Shooting Dogs, and A Sunday in Kigali, Shake Hands with the Devil suffers from a vibe of familiarity that ultimately prevents it from making any kind of a real impact. And though it’s as technically proficient and well acted as any of its predecessors, the movie is strangely lacking in the emotional resonance that one would have expected from the subject matter. Based on Romeo Dallaire’s autobiography of the same name, Shake Hands with the Devil follows Dallaire (superbly played by Roy Dupuis) as he attempts to keep the peace during the mid-’90s extermination of over half a million Tutsis. Director Roger Spottiswoode, working from Michael Donovan’s screenplay, bogs things down with an emphasis on the minute details of Dallaire’s mission, and there’s subsequently no doubt that the viewer is left with exceedingly little to connect with (even Dallaire himself is portrayed as an emotionally-closed off figure). The inclusion of several admittedly powerful sequences, particularly one in which Dallaire defiantly walks through a heavily-armed checkpoint, ensures that the film is never boring exactly, yet one can’t help but feel a palpable sense of fatigue with this topic (that being said, this is probably the most all-encompassing look at the tragedy to date).

** out of ****