text: This film is terrible. I was really looking forward to it, as I thought "Lantana" was great.<br /><br />The following review may contain *spoilers*<br /><br />*****<br /><br />First, the good things: it looks great, some of the performances are OK. The bad things are everything else about it. <br /><br />The story, as you possibly know, is about some blokes who go fishing and discover a body, with the twist that they find it on Friday but continue fishing and finally report it on Sunday when they get back into mobile (cell phone) range. However the film takes it's time (boy does it take its time) getting to this central event.<br /><br />Of the ensemble of characters (about a dozen), not one seems to like another one (which is, I suppose, consistent, because they are all unlikable). I was extremely frustrated by the failure to adequately explain how the characters are related, and it was not until near the end of the movie that I could vaguely construct the family tree. <br /><br />It's hard to think of a film us unrelentingly grim, which is a failure in the structure of the story, as the character's lives seem just as bad before the fishing trip as after. Once you've set the bar so high, it's hard to up-it short of everyone committing suicide.<br /><br />There are silly lapses in logic. The killer dumps the body in the lake, and then it somehow drifts miles upstream into the mountains. The fishermen walk out Sunday morning, but for some reason Byrne gets home late at night after his wife has gone to bed. Then first thing the next morning the cops bang on the door to get him to come down to the station. Um, they haven't heard of the telephone? Down at the station, the media know the whole story, less than 24 hours after they reported the body?<br /><br />Totally missing from the story is the debate the blokes surely had after they find the body. This is a mystery - everyone asks them "how could you do that?" and the audience is asking the same question. (The debate about what to do with the body is the key scene in "Deliverance"). I know exactly what I'd do in their situation. Someone needs to walk out to the car, drive to mobile range, call the cops, wait, and them guide them back to the location. If the others wait at camp and fish, who cares?<br /><br />A lot of all this just seems false. The only thing that rung true was that, as the girl was black, the local aboriginals seized on the fishermen's actions as racist - "wouldn't have done it if it was a white girl." <br /><br />Throughout there is a curious indifference to who might have killed the girl (I think the subject is mentioned once), and there is no mystery, as the audience sees the killer in the opening scene.<br /><br />So I'm sitting there simultaneously bored and confused, when there's a twist - not in the plot, but the theme. Suddenly it becomes about the quiet dignity of the bereaved aboriginals leading to a ludicrous ending with some incoherent stuff about black-white reconciliation. Huh?<br /><br />This is Australian film "at its finest", according to The Age.