MOVIE REVIEW: AUSTRALIA

Two of Seven Cows

Wow! I just saw Australia, starring Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman, and all I can say is “Wow!” This is perhaps the worst movie of the year, or at least the worst movie that would like to be taken seriously. Well, trust me, you can’t. This movie is baaaaaaaaaaaaaaad!

                
Meant as a throwback to WWII-era epics like – well, I’ll think of one – Australia is long, tedious, clichéd, melodramatic, manipulative, boring, contrived, shallow, confused, patronizing, absurd, and awful. And yet I’ve seen it receive some positive reviews: Consider my mind boggled. This movie is objectively terrible, no matter how you try to slice it. The only explanation I can find is that there’s a politically-correct white-guilt storyline that some reviewers might be afraid to find fault with. Well, not me; that’s a tired storyline and this is a terrible movie. Period.

                
To begin with, Nicole Kidman’s performance is nothing short of embarrassing. For the first half of the movie her “acting” is reduced to simpering, mugging and stomping her feet. Hugh Jackman, who plays The Drover (really, that’s his name), does better, but is mistreated by the script which imposes an absurd beefcake angle on his character. Mission Boy (really, that’s his name), played by Jamal Bednarz-Metallah, is cute enough to make all the middle-aged women go goopy, but I just wanted to hit him with a shovel.

                
And that, for me, was the biggest problem with this whole mess; the emotional manipulation in this movie was all of the easiest, shallowest kind and it simply irritated the bajeebers out of me. There’s the poor widowed woman trying to save her ranch from the big, mean cattleman who’s only joy is in trampling all that’s good and decent. There’s the cutesy-cutesy little half-breed boy crying “please don’t kill my mommy,” and his wise medicine-man grandfather who sings to the earth, or something, while being hunted for a crime he didn’t commit. I’m surprised they didn’t have the big white meanies kill the little boy’s dog… no, wait, they did have the big white meanies kill the little boy’s dog.  See what I mean?

                
There are so many faults with this thing that I should probably have asked for a special section in this week’s paper. There’s the slapstick beginning of the movie, the beefcake middle section that looks like a Chippendale’s interpretation of City Slickers II: The Legend of Curley’s Gold, and the melodramatic later section with so many false endings that you begin to wonder if the horror will ever cease. Suffice to say that you, dear reader, are better than this.

                
How I’d love to go on, but alas I’m out of space. I love these snarky reviews and so consider this my Christmas present from Hollywood. Perhaps for my birthday they’ll give me a sequel. I give Australia two cows.