South Africa’s apartheid-era ruling class belongs to that exclusive Hollywood club — let’s call it “das Klub” — of perfect villains: pale-skinned racists possessed of an abrasive mother tongue. (Arthur C. Clarke once opined that even a polite exchange in Afrikaans is “damaging to innocent bystanders.”)

It is perhaps unsurprising that Phillip Noyce’s “Catch a Fire,” a true story of a South African resistance fighter (Derek Luke) is, so to speak, a black-and-white affair. To its credit, the film lends its main Boer antagonist, an icy “counterterrorism” agent of the white government, a shade of nuance. To its discredit, he is played rather uninterestingly by Tim Robbins. There’s nothing too surprising about Mr. Luke’s performance either, which is probably why “Catch a Fire,” a fairly compelling action-drama with its heart in the right place, never really ignites the screen.

Two very different pictures of South Africa circa 1980 converge in the film’s opening scenes. One is a wedding celebration in a rural village. The sun shines down on the festivities while guests dance to a funky blend of disco and tribal music. Then there is the less pleasant image of a nearby oil refinery, a dark, sinister-looking complex that supports the white power structure. (South Africa’s government parried international sanctions, and almost surely delayed the end of apartheid, by converting coal into fuel.) Grimly industrial and heavily fortified, the plant is also a metaphor for the country’s minority rule. It looks more like a prison camp than a factory.

The film’s hero, a polite, footloose soccer devotee named Patrick Chamusso (Mr. Luke),is a foreman there. His job allows him to support his wife (Bonnie Henna) and two daughters; he has no desire to jeopardize things by getting mixed up in politics, even though the rustlings of the independence movement are becoming increasingly difficult to ignore. Patrick’s mother tries to listen to African National Congress broadcasts in his modest living room, but he furiously shuts the radio off. If she wants anything to do with that group, he shouts, she can go join them in Mozambique.

Patrick’s factory, a prime target of the ANC’s militant wing, is bombed one night when he should have been on duty. Patrick is innocent, but his lousy alibi draws the suspicion of the white authorities. Detective Nic Vos (Mr. Robbins) and his men round up Patrick and his coworkers and take them to a secret camp, where they torture them to extract confessions. Filmed as a montage intercut with haunting close-ups of an ostrich (a beguiling analogy for oppression perhaps borrowed from Luis Bunuel’s 1974 classic “The Phantom of Liberty”), these sequences are harrowing, without being overly explicit. It is in the aftermath of the torture sessions, when the prisoners are filmed at floor level, the camera angle canted to convey fearful disorientation, that the effects of this sort of brutality hit home.

Nic disapproves of the wanton abuse of the accused that the other agents seem to relish, but he is nevertheless convinced he’s doing what it takes to keep his country safe — and that he has the right man. In that regard, he’s certainly wrong, but he doesn’t realize it until after Patrick makes a forced confession, at which point he has the integrity to overrule his colleagues and let Patrick go free. But the damage has already been done; Patrick has come face to face with the nastiest side of white rule, and decides he must do his part to bring it down. He sneaks into neighboring Mozambique and joins the freedom fighters.

Two of the film’s most memorable moments take place at the training camp there. At a roll call, a militant leader asks his cadets at the top of his voice if they are ready to die. As their repeated shouts of “Yes!” are issued faster and faster, the fearsome power of a righteous group cause can be felt in the dizzying crescendo. Shortly thereafter, South African commandos raid their compound, sending the young militants to arms in a brief but shocking burst of violence. Both scenes gain much of their force from Jill Bilcock’s masterful editing.

By the time Patrick helps to orchestrate an attempt to take the oil refinery out for good, with Nic hot on his tail, it would take a hard soul not to be on Patrick’s side. There’s a decent amount of suspense in the air. But neither character supplies enough of a dramatic charge to bring the whole thing off.

Nic may be an organization man, but he remains too suave and opaque in Mr. Robbins’s portrayal. The actor speaks in a mushy low growl, which allows him to fudge the South African accent; but the clipped consonants of that accent, and its slightly loutish treatment of vowels, could have added some pungency to a character (and a class) too embattled to acknowledge that it is racism, not “the blacks,” that keeps that keeps his family in danger at night. Of similarly mild temperament, and perhaps even more one-dimensional, is Mr. Luke’s family man-turned-freedom fighter. Mr. Luke, a very handsome young actor who often turns up in American sports movies, speaks in a murmur that’s so gentle it sounds put on. Patrick, a folk hero, doesn’t necessarily need to be a deep character, but he should at least be convincing.

Like “Rabbit-Proof Fence,” Mr. Noyce’s better-executed film about Australian Aborigines resisting white oppression,”Catch a Fire” ends with recent documentary footage of its real-life protagonist. The epilogue is a wonderfully poignant counterpoint to the fictionalized version. It’s just that in this case, it’s not an especially flattering one.