Having just seen the vastly superior Australian film,'Sweet Country' about men in the outback and remembering the equally compelling movie about Ned Kelly of a few years ago, this film about a 'legendary' bushranger outlaw is a lame effort by comparison.
I am sure the historical Ben Hall was an interesting character, but you wouldn't know it from this inept script. First of all he spends much of the movie pining after an old love and his son. If he really wanted to be with his son all he had to do is put down his gun and pick up a plough. Was this longing for a family really the heart of Ben Hall's story? It doesn't seem likely or believable or even very interesting.
Also his insistence of never killing anyone is ludicrous when you consider in the 'action' parts, Hall and his pursuers fire volley after volley - in real life, these scenes would be followed by the sight of many corpses littering the ground. But like the Saturday matinee westerns of my youth, they never hit anybody and they never stop to reload. Everything is predictable, the script, the acting and the music which gets in the way. The director apparently spent seven years researching Hall's history but apparently all he absorbed was how to make the locations, the costumes, and the weapons appropriate to the period. Somewhere along the line, the real Ben Hall escaped, as he so often did in real life.
I am sure the historical Ben Hall was an interesting character, but you wouldn't know it from this inept script. First of all he spends much of the movie pining after an old love and his son. If he really wanted to be with his son all he had to do is put down his gun and pick up a plough. Was this longing for a family really the heart of Ben Hall's story? It doesn't seem likely or believable or even very interesting.
Also his insistence of never killing anyone is ludicrous when you consider in the 'action' parts, Hall and his pursuers fire volley after volley - in real life, these scenes would be followed by the sight of many corpses littering the ground. But like the Saturday matinee westerns of my youth, they never hit anybody and they never stop to reload. Everything is predictable, the script, the acting and the music which gets in the way. The director apparently spent seven years researching Hall's history but apparently all he absorbed was how to make the locations, the costumes, and the weapons appropriate to the period. Somewhere along the line, the real Ben Hall escaped, as he so often did in real life.