Parents' Guide to 180

A child's death in a burst of road rage sends this movie charging forward with the hard, no-nonsense force of the kind of thriller Denzel Washington might have made in the 1990s. 180 turns grief into momentum and then into even more rage, trapping us inside the same adrenaline that is pushing Zak forward. It does not really challenge the vigilante fantasy so much as inhabit it, with the blunt, entertaining energy of an older action thriller that knows how to keep tightening the screws. It's also extremely violent, sometimes unpleasantly so, but there's something special going on here as well, right from the striking opening images, which find a strange beauty in fluorescent lights and a bus stop before everything starts to unravel.

The performances carry a lot of the film's emotional force, especially in the way Zak and Portia grieve the same loss from such different places. They almost seem to be in different movies at times, and somehow that works, because grief really can isolate people that way. There's a beautiful scene in the shower where the water seems to become part of their mourning, and moments like that give the movie a depth its genre machinery doesn't always earn on its own. Grootboom is astonishing, grounding Zak's anger, pain, and pride in something painfully human, as the film circles a question that feels central to it: why do so many men need to be right, even when being right is destroying everything around them? The South African setting and multilingual texture add richness too, keeping the movie from feeling generic even when the beats are familiar.