Film Reviews

Australia

• Rating:
• Director:
• Starring: Bryan Brown
• Details: Australia/US / 165mins (12A).

Baz Luhrman's new venture might be an epic, but only because Luhrmann has shoved all the elements that make an epic into a film that does't need them. We get two movies for the price of one in Australia and the 'first movie' works better: Set during the onset of WWII, English aristocrat Lady Sarah Ashley (Kidman) moves to Australia to join her husband in Faraway Downs, a sprawling cattle ranch somewhere 'near' Darwin. Upon arrival, though, Sarah learns that an Aborigine has murdered her husband and that her hold on the property is slipping. With no one to drive her cattle to the waiting British Navy ship in Darwin, Sarah is expected to sell Faraway Downs to King Carney (Brown), the Northern Territory beef magnate, at a fraction of the price. Enter The Drover (a super-buffed Jackman), who offers to drive the herd across the desert and save Sarah from her plight.

Although it's hard to care about Kidman's dilemma (her rich girl is too busy shooting lusty eyes at Jackman to grieve for her husband), those will they/wont they scenes with Jackman are a lot of fun with Jackman hamming it up no end. The homage to westerns of the 50s and 60s are enjoyable too: there are endless Death Valley-esque sweeping shots, Jackman's introduction is pure Eastwood, Kidman acts like she's a John Ford heroine, and the night scenes during the cattle drive have a deliberate sound stage look to them. All of this is fun, but then the fun stops and the problems start very early in the Michael Bay/Pearl Harbour 'second movie'.

Australia, plot wise, is over at this point but Luhrmann trundles on for no other reason than that's what an epic does. Although the director hopes that the stories gel, there's such a thick line dividing them it's as if the same cast are acting in an entirely different film. Boredom and itchy backsides take over, the humour disappears and there aren't any more feisty back-and-forths. Gone too are the grandiose shots. The clangy moments that were ignored in the first half become increasingly difficult to disregard in the second: David Wenham's once passable bad guy becomes too cartoonish to be taken seriously and the inclusion of the Asian cook is comic relief from yesteryear.

Review by Gavin Burke