Problem: OPTIONS:
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- positive positive
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Answer: The story of Ned Kelly has been enshrouded in myth and exaggeration for time out of hand, and this film is no exception. What ensures Ned Kelly has a permanent place in history is the effort he went to in order to even the odds against the policemen hunting him. During several battles, he marched out wearing plates of beaten iron, off which the bullets available to police at the time would harmlessly bounce. Indeed, it is only because there were a few bright sparks among the Victorian police who noticed he hadn't plated up his legs that he was captured and hanged. The story has been told in schools and histories of Australia for so long that some permutations of the story have, ironically, become boring. The more the stories try to portray Kelly as some inhuman or superhuman monster, the less people pay attention.

Which is where this adaptation of Our Sunshine, a novel about the Kelly legend, excels. Rather than attempting to portray a Ned Kelly who is as unfeeling as the armour he wore, the film quickly establishes him as a human being. Indeed, the reversal of the popular legend, showing the corruption of the Victorian police and the untenable situation of the colonists, goes a long way to make this film stand out from the crowd. Here, Ned Kelly is simply a human being living in a time and place where in order to be convicted of murder, one simply had to be the nearest person to the corpse when a policeman found it. No, I am not making that up. About the only area where the film errs is by exaggerating the Irish versus English mentality of the battles. While the Kelly gang were distinctly Irish, Australia has long been a place where peoples of wildly varied ethnicities have mixed together almost seamlessly (a scene with some Chinese migrants highlights this).

Heath Ledger does an amazing job of impersonating Australia's most notorious outlaw. It is only because of the fame he has found in other films that the audience is aware they are watching Ledger and not Kelly himself. Orlando Bloom has finally found a role in which he doesn't look completely lost without his bow, and Geoffrey Rush's appearance as the leader of the police contingent at Glenrowan goes to show why he is one of the most revered actors in that desolate little island state. But it is Naomi Watts, appearing as Julia Cook, who gets a bit of a bum deal in this film. Although the film basically implies that Cook was essentially the woman in Ned Kelly's life, but you would not know that from the minimal screen time that she gets here. Indeed, a lot of the film's hundred and ten minutes feels more freeze-dried than explorative. Once the element of police corruption is established, in fact, the film rockets along so fast at times that it almost feels rushed.

Unfortunately, most of the film's strengths are not capitalised upon. Rush barely gets more screen time than his name does in the opening and closing credits. Ditto for Watts, and the rest of the cast come off a little like mannequins. I can only conclude that another fifteen, or even thirty, minutes of footage might have fixed this. But that leads to the other problem, in that the lack of any depth or background to characters other than the titular hero leaves the events of the story with zero impact. One scene manages to do the speech-making thing well, but unfortunately, it all becomes a collage of moments with no linking after a while. If one were to believe the impression that this film creates, a matter of weeks, even days, passes between the time that Ned Kelly becomes a wanted man on the say-so of one corrupt policeman, and the infamous shootout at Glenrowan. Annoyingly, the trial and execution of Ned Kelly is not even depicted here, simply referred to in subtitles before the credits roll.

That said, aside from some shaky camera-work at times, Ned Kelly manages to depict some exciting shootouts, and it has a good beginning. For that reason, I rated it a seven out of ten. Other critics have not been so kind, so if you're not impressed by shootouts with unusual elements (and what could more more unusual than full body armour in a colonial shootout?), then you might be better off looking elsewhere. Especially if you want a more factual account of Ned Kelly's life.
An example of a movie review. negative (OPTIONS:
- negative
- positive).

A: Recherche is a good word to describe this movie.

Let's say every movie has a selling point, a gimmick. Transformers' gimmick is the awesome effects as well as fan boys nostalgia. Sleepless in Seattle's gimmick is situational in their tag-line, "What if someone you never met, someone you never saw, someone you never knew was the only someone for you?" Many romance relies heavily on these gimmicks and some through draw of big names. Leap Years employs both by using the Irish folklore as the circumstance and featuring considerably famous names within the country.

So now that the audience are in the cinema, besides all the usual elements in characters, conflict or consequences, crisis, resolve and denouement, they also look forward to stimulating dialog, more absorbing situations as a result of the leap years, interesting sub-plots and perhaps, to a certain extent, a good twist in the middle or towards the end of the story that favors the circumstances of the characters.

This is what Jean Yeo is trying not to achieve. If they've tried to, their goal was apparently in the other court, at the other stadium, on the other end of the planet. She and her writer, Alain Layrac, utterly failed to provide stimulating dialog. Most of the lines were contrived. It seems that they have a bag filled with lines which she would like to use in her movie: "Okay, these are the lines and quotes which I've heard or read from either movies I've seen or books I've read before and they all sound good to me. If they sound good to me, they will sound good to the audience. Therefore, all i have to do is piece them all together. I am going to use all of them." The result is cathartic. I can't say that the lines were unnecessary and bears no relation to the story or in driving the plot on, but they seem to spring out of nowhere, catching you off guard with these quotable quotes.

On a personal level, i know people who cite quotes based on most of the situations in our dialog, trying to make it meaningful to themselves while nodding along. I don't go out with them anymore because the urge to punch them is overwhelming.

Secondly, the characters portrayed are silly and one-dimensional. With exception to the unnatural dialog which implies their motivation (necessary to drive the plot), there was no sense of conviction in them. I haven't an idea who they are. They are all simpletons spouting lines from the advice column of a female-oriented magazine.

The gimmick in the leap years is not enough to drive the story on because the circumstances are too shallow. Then again, there are movies with less but fared better than this, aren't there. They made it up with my first and second point. Moreover, the sub-plots are inconsequential (not that it's a bad thing for movies) and thin (bad thing).

Jean Yeo and the producers are trying to pass off the terrible plot with fancy locations and passable photography. This is because they probably understand that it is possible and easier to attain the approval from some viewers than the others with the good use of cinematography, soundtrack and filming location. These non-discerning viewers.

It is not even the kind of movie that is so bad that it's good. It is just bad. Don't watch this.
Problem: OPTIONS:
- negative
- positive negative
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Answer:
Lame, lame, lame!!! A 90-minute cringe-fest that's 89 minutes too long. A setting ripe with atmosphere and possibility (an abandoned convent) is squandered by a stinker of a script filled with clunky, witless dialogue that's straining oh-so-hard to be hip. Mostly it's just embarrassing, and the attempts at gonzo horror fall flat (a sample of this movie's dialogue: after demonstrating her artillery, fast dolly shot to a closeup of Barbeau's vigilante charactershe: 'any questions?' hyuck hyuck hyuck). Bad acting, idiotic, homophobic jokes and judging from the creature effects, it looks like the director's watched 'The Evil Dead' way too many times.

I owe my friends big time for renting this turkey and subjecting them to ninety wasted minutes they'll never get back. What a turd.