The film tells the story of four young men and the extremes they went to in order to capture their pictures in the days prior to the downfall of apartheid in South Africa.
, a veteran foreign correspondent and contributing editor at Columbia Journalism Review said in her review of the film that it is "the latest Hollywood production to get the role of the conflict correspondent wrong". Matloff wrote: "But the reporters and photographers stationed in South Africa at the time were also compassionate human beings who exposed themselves to danger because they wanted to record history. This doesn't particularly come through in the film. Instead, Silver plays to the Hollywood stereotype of journalists as heartless outsiders. After a fun day taking pictures of black people massacring each other, the lads go back to the white suburbs and party — the implication being that the bloodshed is a game to them." Matloff worked with Marinovich and knew Silva, as she was a member of the Johannesburg press corps in the early 1990s. She wrote in her article for the Columbia Journalism Review of her experiences, "The film depicts the photographers as reckless thrill-seekers, swaggering into newsrooms like rock stars and canoodling with babes, when not jumping into cars to chase 'Bang Bang' ". In her review Matloff said that Marinovich had disassociated himself from the film version. "It has the same title but it is not the same story. It's not my life. I don't see the character as me." Miriam Brent in her review for The Guardian said "Frustratingly, though, while the film poses pertinent questions about when to put the camera down, it shies away from delving deeper into these moral dilemmas and the emotional strain faced by combat photographers. Instead we're introduced to a testosterone-fuelled world in which dodging bullets is just another way of getting kicks before the partying starts. … It's just a shame the accomplished cinematography isn't matched by a script that lets the true bravery and accomplishments of combat photojournalists shine through, as they deserve." Some more reviewers critiqued the missing of the real characters of the members of the Bang-Bang Club in the film. João Silva was asked in an interview for the French magazine Paris Match about the film. His answer described Michel Peyrard with the words: The Bang Bang Club received mixed reviews., it holds a 49% rating on Rotten Tomatoes based on 47 reviews, with an average rating of 5.89/10.
