Force Of Nature: The Dry 2

This is a version of a review airing on ABC Victoria's Statewide Mornings program on February 22, 2024.

(M) ★★

Director: Robert Connolly.

Cast: Eric Bana, Anna Torv, Deborra-Lee Furness, Robin McLeavy, Sisi Stringer, Lucy Ansell, Jacqueline McKenzie, Tony Briggs, Jeremy Lindsay Taylor, Richard Roxburgh, Kenneth Radley, Ash Ricardo, Archie Thomson.

"Welp, that's it. I'm fucking lost."

Eric Bana is a good actor. Chopper - amazing. He does great comedy - check out The Castle and Funny People. He's a solid Bruce Banner, a memorable Star Trek villain, and has worked with Steven Spielberg, Ridley Scott, and Joe Wright.

So why do I find him so underwhelming as Aaron Falk in The Dry movies? 

The novel of The Dry is a modern Aussie genre classic - a near-perfect crime novel that was turned into a half-decent movie of the same name. The film's biggest downside was Bana's weirdly flat performance. It's the same in the sequel Force Of Nature, although here he's joined by an equally disappointing Jacqueline McKenzie (another hugely talented actor). 

The pair combine to play an unconvincing cop duo called in to help find a group of women lost in the Aussie bush on a corporate retreat. Each woman has a secret, leaving the cops to wonder what is going on out in the fog and ferns. 

In The Dry, it's Falk's personal connection to events that amplifies the classic story and provides an emotional core. That's missing from the novel of Force Of Nature, but the attempts here to shoehorn a subplot involving Falk's past are confusing, distracting and, well, terrible. 

Indeed, when the film leaves the flashbacks of the women lost in the bush, it suffers immensely. Force Of Nature is a movie of two halves. The half led by Bana and McKenzie never reaches the heights of the other half, led by Torv and Furness.

This superior half is filled with intrigue and emotion. Torv, so great in The Newsreader, makes Alice wonderfully complex - sometimes likeable, sometimes hissable. She's a standout, but along with Furness, McLeavy, Stringer and Ansell, they make their characters feel like real people in a truly dire situation, unlike Bana and McKenzie's Falk and Cooper, who never connect as cops.

Force Of Nature looks great (a few weather inconsistencies aside) and makes the most of some superb location shoots. But the story sits unevenly - its additions to Harper's plot are awkward, and its investigation plot never rings true.

A third and fourth book exist, but it remains to be seen whether they'll be made. I'm not holding my breath.

Damsel

This is a version of a review airing on ABC Victoria's Statewide Mornings program on March 21, 2024.

(M) ★★★

Director: Juan Carlos Fresnadillo.

Cast: Millie Bobby Brown, Ray Winstone, Angela Bassett, Robin Wright, Brooke Carter, Nick Robinson, Shohreh Aghdashloo.

"M'lady, your scaffolding is showing!"

What if the Knight In Shining Armour didn't rescue the Damsel In Distress, and said Damsel had to do her own arse-kicking?

That's the central premise of this surprisingly brutal revisionist fairy tale, which flips a bunch of fantasy tropes on their heads and gives us a dragon-battling heroine who definitely doesn't need a Prince Charming to save the day.

Brown is the titular princess, married off to a handsome prince (Robinson) to save her people, but who finds that wedded bliss is fleeting thanks to a hungry dragon with a taste for royal blood (the actual blood of royalty, not the band).

There's not a lot going on in this fractured fairy tale, but what it does, it does well. Even though the End of Act I Twist is visible from a mile away, the film doesn't take too long getting to it, and from there Damsel straps on its sword and rides into the breach with conviction and a single-mindedness that's impressive. It's only when the film drifts into imagined flashbacks and impossible knowledge that things get off the track, but for the most part it sticks to flipping the script on ye olde Damsel In Distress cliche, and makes it work.

Brown more than holds her own as the resourceful princess unwilling to go down without a fight. The script doesn't make her out to be superhuman, and Brown imbues her with the right mix of determination and fragility. In a fantastical world, she remains believable and empathetic. 

She's the shining light in a strong cast, with Winstone, Wright and Bassett all doing well with what are essentially bit parts in Millie Bobby Brown Versus The Dragon. As for the Dragon, voiced with menace by Aghdashloo, she's an interesting character. The CG is occasionally ropey, which is a let down, but at least it doesn't come off as yet another Smaug clone.

But that's the point here - to not do the things the other fantasy stories do. Somehow it still feels familiar, and the story is either thin or focussed, depending on how you look at it, but it works. Damsel certainly isn't the first film to flip a fairy tale with a feminist rewrite - Tangled and Frozen come to mind - but it does it in a way that is satisfying and true to its intentions. There's certainly a lot more third-degree burns and charred corpses in this one, too.

Damsel isn't going to win any awards, but there are far worse fantasy films out there.

Poor Things

This is a version of a review airing on ABC Victoria's Statewide Mornings program on March 7, 2024.

(MA15+) ★★★★★

Director: Yorgos Lanthimos.

Cast: Emma Stone, Mark Ruffalo, Willem Dafoe, Ramy Youssef, Christopher Abbott, Suzy Bemba, Jerrod Carmichael, Kathryn Hunter, Vicki Pepperdine, Margaret Qualley, Hanna Schygulla.

"But why does the Lion not simply eat Dorothy?"

Way back in the early days of this millennium when I was a wee cadet journalist, one of the elder journos, who was always ready with a useful piece of advice, warned me off using the word "unique".

"It's one of the most misused words in journalism," he explained.

"It literally means 'one of a kind', so don't use it when you just mean 'different' and 'uncommon' - only use it when something is truly, literally 'unique' and there is nothing else like it."

After all these years, I feel I can finally use the word "unique".

Poor Things is a unique film. 

It's a steampunk coming-of-age fairy tale, mixed with an occasionally disturbing commentary on the patriarchy and a frequently hilarious exploration of morals and social conventions. It's bizarre, it's laugh-out-loud funny and it's wonderfully weird, yet it's also thought-provoking and confronting. If that's not unique, then I don't know what is, and I fear I will never get to use the word.

Poor Things is the story of Bella (Stone), who is the result of a morally dubious experiment by mad scientist Godwin Baxter (Dafoe). Having spent her entire life inside his lab, Bella is whisked away by a hedonistic cad named Duncan Wedderburn (Ruffalo) and begins a strange journey of self-discovery in a challenging world.

There is so much to admire about Poor Things. It often looks and feels like the love child of David Lynch and Terry Gilliam, but that's selling it short. Lanthimos and cinematographer Robbie Ryan give us fish-eye lenses, odd angles, plenty of zooms, pinhole views and every other weird trick they can think of to throw us off balance and show an unfamiliar world in which they can present some sadly familiar problems. It's wonderfully unsettling, and makes the incredible sets and stunning production design even more otherworldly.

Equally otherworldly is Stone as Bella. Her journey from infantile naivety to mature self-awareness is strangely powerful and powerfully strange, and Stone never misses a step along the way. It's a physical role, almost robotic in places, but Stone never stops finding the humanity in the absurdity.

Ruffalo is also excellent as the bon vivant brought to his knees by Bella. His is an equally flashy performance, and Ruffalo shows off his knack for over-the-top comedy as he chews his absurd accent and the scenery at the same time.

Poor Things is proof that there is room for weirdly wonderful cinema in this world. Fans of Lanthimos already knew this, but his latest gives us heart that such unique and inventive film-making can find a home among a wide audience.