WORLD TOUR Day 52 - Australia
BEFORE: I thought I was going to have to skip this whole country/continent, and then this film found its way into the collection. I suppose it was either this film or "Priscilla, Queen of the Desert", which oddly enough, also stars Guy Pearce. Linking from "The Quiet American", Michael Caine was also in the film "Children of Men" with Danny Huston (last seen in "The Kingdom").
THE PLOT: A lawman apprehends a notorious outlaw and gives him 9 days to kill his older brother, or else they'll execute his younger brother.
AFTER: Man, I thought Cambodia and Vietnam were tough - Australia's a tough place, too. This is a good reminder that Australia started as a prison colony, and turned into something like the American Old West mixed with the dystopian future of "Mad Max". This film is set in the late 19th century, though, so it's more like the Old West.
A gang of four brothers is wanted for rape and murder, and the authorities capture two of the brothers, one of whom might be mentally disabled. The local captain (sheriff) takes a big risk by letting the other one go to hunt down and kill his at-large brother, while holding the younger one in jail.
This is a tough one to rate, because the narrative really isn't that strong - it's a simple story with just a few turning points, and even those tend to get repeated, so it's hard to give proper credit for them. We never really find out the lead character's true motivation or where his loyalties lie until the very end, and that's due to a plot contrivance that sidelines him for a while.
What remains is violence, and some excessive Peckinpah-style violence at that. The movie almost makes a point about corporal punishment - when the townspeople demand it and see how brutal it can be, it changes some minds. But the movie contradicts this point by glorifying violence throughout the rest of the film.
So the cycles continue, and the overall prospects for the nearly-lawless Outback seem rather bleak as a result. That leaves me wondering what the overall point was.
The Australian Outback is huge, presenting me with a technical problem - how to measure the mileage to a location that 's not specified in the film? I'm going to use as a marker one of the main shooting locations, as listed on the IMDB.
Also starring Guy Pearce (last seen in "Death Defying Acts"), Ray Winstone (last seen in "Percy Jackson & The Olympians: The Lightning Thief"), Emily Watson (last seen in "Synechdoche, New York"), John Hurt (last seen in "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1"), Noah Taylor (last seen in "Max").
DISTANCE TRAVELED TODAY: 3,432 miles / 5,524 km (Saigon/Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam to Winton, Queensland, Australia)
DISTANCE TRAVELED SO FAR: 27,296 miles / 43,933 km
RATING: 4 out of 10 saddlebags
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