rated PG-13 
The ending of Phillip Noyce’s sensitive yet ultimately unsatisfying new film, “Catch a Fire,” is constructed like most hunts found in conventional thrillers. Whatever tension the audience is supposed to feel in these situations usually comes out of rooting for the person who has your sympathy: you either want the hunted to escape or the predator to catch his prey. Given that “Catch a Fire” takes place in 1980 in South Africa, when apartheid was in full force, and that the hunted is an outlaw member of the African National Congress, it should feel as though there’s more at stake here than whether someone is caught or escapes.

But it doesn’t. The problem is that the audience never gets to know the protagonist, the real-life Patrick Chamusso (Derek Luke), other than being provided some superficial details that complicate matters, but aren’t particularly enlightening.

Rather, it’s the background stories of this film, the stories of the men and women fighting to regain their country, stories of oppression by government and the laws that it uses to maintain the status quo, that have an emotional grandeur about them. As the two main characters stand in the forefront, we watch a more compelling, sweeping drama play out behind them.

The film is based on a true story. Chamusso is a foreman at the huge Secunda oil refinery, in charge of a small team of men whom he protects from both the restrictive rules of the company and the law of the land. In a few quick, well-defined scenes, you can see that Chamusso is smarter and more careful than the others. He wants to stay employed and get ahead, in no small part because he likes to provide a nice home and furniture (impoverished by our standards) for his lovely wife, Precious (Bonnie Henna). He is not, at the beginning, a sympathizer with the ANC.

Chamusso is also a good family man, and he coaches the local soccer team to a regional championship. But there’s a facet of his life that’s well-hidden from his current wife and family. During the championship trip, Chamusso visits a former girlfriend and their child. The trip makes his return home late, and as they drive by the oil refinery, there’s an explosion. Then, the wheels come off Chamusso’s life.

Of course he has no alibi, and is arrested. The chief interrogating officer is Col. Nic Vos, played by Tim Robbins. There’s been some praise for Robbins’ performance; reviewers have noticed he tries to make the character something less than a stock villain by giving him moments of tenderness and affection. He plays guitar for his daughters, or takes them to target practice so they can protect themselves, but these scenes really shouldn’t invoke sympathy. They should make the villain even more chilling. How does a person, in the end, display moments of sanity when their day job requires rape and torture? It shouldn’t be necessary to buy into the fact that Vos is human, because that really is beside the point. The real question is how a human being could be capable of such madness.

Vos eventually lets Chamusso go for lack of evidence and, jobless and without his family, Chamusso makes the decision to become a freedom fighter and join the ANC. We can see why Chamusso would make such a choice, but we never really feel it. It’s easy to seethe at Robbins’ villain—he is, after all, on the wrong side of history and his character uses any deplorable and despicable method at his disposal to get what he wants—but Derek Luke’s portrayal of Chamusso never reveals the inner workings of the man at the heart of the story. With no emotional foundation, other than a natural sympathy for the man and his cause, the story tends to drift and stay distant.

Director Phillip Noyce (“Patriot Games,” “Clear and Present Danger”) certainly has a way with action. The short scenes of the championship game are nicely played out on a dusty, grassless field (though the musical score during these moments, by Philip Miller, is so weirdly triumphant that it’s jarring, as if a soccer game were what’s at stake in the film), and the scenes where government soldiers attack the ANC compound are efficient and tense. Noyce always seems comfortable when the camera is moving, when there’s action in front of him. You never get lost in his movies, and the audience knows where it is at all times, which sometimes makes for thrilling cinema.

More importantly, for the purposes of this story, Noyce does not overplay the differences between the lives of the whites and the blacks; he lets them play out in an everyday manner that makes them even more powerful. It even gives the movie a quasi-documentary feel at times. At one point, Precious, who has taken a job as a domestic, is hanging laundry when her employer comes out to hand to her an envelope containing information gathered by the government on her husband. When woman who hands Precious the envelope simply says, “I don’t want any trouble, girl,” it’s heartbreaking to see a human being reduced to such servitude. This human wreckage, this emotional and physical violence, is sprawled all across the backdrop of the film and is unbearable to think about.

There are a few night scenes that have a haunting beauty. In just a few shots we can see small, unlighted shacks, huts stacked up on the vast desert sand where the original people of South Africa have been forced to live. In the distance twinkle the lights of far-off cities, making them seem romantic and otherworldly. You feel how the lives of the native South Africans are separated by more than mere geography from the whites. These smaller moments in “Catch a Fire” have real power to them. They make not only the landscape seem mysterious, but also the strange, ugly laws that people sometimes make to protect what they’ve convinced themselves is theirs, but most assuredly is not.