Daniel Radcliffe has come a long way since Harry Potter, and his newest role sees him trying to escape from the toughest prison this side of Azkaban.
It’s been a while since we’ve had a good prison escape movie in the vein of The Great Escape or Escape from Alcatraz, and while Radcliffe’s Escape from Pretoria probably won’t live up to the iconic reputations of those films, it at least has the word “escape” in the title. That’s a start, right? The movie is based on the true story of Tim Jenkin, a South African anti-apartheid activist who was a political prisoner of the nation’s apartheid government in the 1970s. Jenkin was held in the notorious Pretoria prison — that is, until he and two other inmates pulled off an incredible escape. Here’s the film’s official synopsis:
Daniel Radcliffe stars as Tim Jenkin – a real life ANC activist who was imprisoned in Africa’s maximum security prison Pretoria in the 1970s during the Apartheid. Along with two imprisoned fellow freedom fighters, played by Daniel Webber and Mark Leonard Winter, Tim escaped on 11th December 1970 using hand-made wooden keys which he crafted whilst incarcerated.
The film’s first trailer, which was recently released, looks all kinds of thrilling. In it, we see Jenkin coming up with the wild idea of crafting keys out of wood that can be used to open the prison doors — all while the horrors of apartheid still reign around him. It is, in a word, intense.
Escape from Pretoria will arrive in theaters on March 6. 2020.
