A documentary by Patrick Reed. Unrated. Opens Friday, May 31, at the Cinematheque

During a scene in Fight Like Soldiers, Die Like Children, retired general Roméo Dallaire shakes hands with the devil: an African warlord in the Democratic Republic of Congo who denies using child soldiers. Dallaire politely questions him, then curses the liar later.

And therein lies the problem of diplomatic attempts to end the use of kids as weapons of war—and of the documentary itself. Rather than delving directly into Africa’s heart of darkness, Patrick Reed’s new documentary ends up skirting the UN bureaucracy that works to halt the exploitation of children by warlords. So although the film breaks new ground in revealing the complexity of the problem, that doesn’t make for the kind of passion you’ll find in a movie like War Witch.

The film, based on Dallaire’s latest book, follows the Canadian senator on his quest, driven by the trauma of facing child soldiers during the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. Here, he travels to South Sudan and the DRC.

Descriptions of how kids are forced to fight and work as sex slaves are overly mediated, however. We hear from UN workers and others about children being forced to kill their own parents or take drugs, but most of the victims’ stories are featured in distancing animated sequences. They lack the immediacy of the simple witness sequences in 2007’s Uganda-set documentary War Dance.

As for the solutions the film and Dallaire seek, they find few. As one man puts it, the central problem is governance and an elite that doesn’t care about the people.

In the end, the doc’s lasting image is of Dallaire’s weathered face, his brow furrowed—a vision of frustration and confusion at the pointlessness of the atrocities and the helplessness of those who would try to prevent them.