Force of Nature: The Dry 2 (2024)

The Dry 2 squanders the two things the original The Dry had going for it: its strong evocation of small-town Australia - so real - and Eric Bana's likeable Falk, tied to that place through his past but now a fish-out-of-water city slicker - but here, the setting is a fictional rainforest (the Dandenong, Yarra, and Otway Ranges standing in for the - for some reason fictional - Giraling Ranges) and Falk has been reduced to a generic interrogator of one suspect after another - and in a particularly uninteresting mystery - the disappearance of a woman from the world's dreariest company retreat where five or six women snap at each other about too many plot points all out of scope of their miserable forest prison: peripheral corporate skullduggery, references to bullying, allusions to the wayward pasts of two young sisters, ultimately unnecessary harkbacks to a serial killer case, and Falk's unilluminating backstory - a feeble attempt at grounding him once more in place through his mother's weird disappearance years and years earlier. 

 

★★☆☆☆

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The Dry (2021)

The leads in this mystery - Eric Bana, Genevieve O'Reilly, and Matthew Nable - are terrific, as is the evocation of drought-stricken rural AustralIa (with scenes making me audibly gasp as they transported me back to the local pub, shop, dry creekbed, the local copper, and the locals of my Australian country-town upbringing) but I've read Jane Harper's The Lost Man and now I've seen The Dry and what doesn't rise up to the level of the actors and the photography is Harper's mystery, because like the plot of The Lost Man, this movie's mystery ends with a shrug, like you didn't realise you were just watching an episode of Cop Shop because it was dressed up like Picnic At Hanging Rock.

★★★☆☆

The Other Boleyn Girl (2008)

If an historically inaccurate detail like Eric Bana's black hair bothers you - King Henry VIII famously sported blonde-red locks - then this lavish book-adaptation, a period drama, is going to sorely test you, because although it is loosely based on the historical facts surrounding Anne Boleyn's marriage to Henry VIII, the story is injected with large amounts of historical supposition dismissed by historians as author Philippa Gregory's pure fantasy; nevertheless, it is thought-provoking and very entertaining, offering a vivid sense of Tudor court life (Melrose Place in lavish costumes) and cleverly weaving in the ideas that Anne Boleyn orchestrated Henry's usurpation of papal authority and that charges of incest against her were more than just wilful accusations of a king once again looking for a way out of a marriage.

★★★★☆

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Hulk (2003)

In his other films, director Ang Lee successfully melds themes and genres in a way atypical of traditional Hollywood - homosexual romance and life on the land in the American Midwest in Brokeback Mountain, major release wuxia in Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon - but here, his mix of superhero origin story and drama about the uncommunicative men, delivered in comic-book panels and blobby cgi, is less engaging because Lee forgets to give Bruce Banner anything heroic to do beyond overcoming his personal demons, which I suppose is heroic but it ends up feeling like the movie takes two hours to get to a starting point.

★★☆☆☆

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Star Trek (2009)

The 11th Star Trek film is the action-packed first of the reboots which cleverly combines a fresh new cast (including a perfectly cast Chris Pine as Captain James T Kirk and Zachary Quinto as Spock) with an alternate reality/time travel plot that allows director J J Abrams to go right back to the beginning (the birth of Kirk) and then get loose with Star Trek dogma.

★★★★☆

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Hanna (2011)

A girl is raised by Eric Bana to be an assassin but ham-fisted fairytale themes dog the girl at every turn of her story, making what could have been a Euro-cool spy thriller a strange farce.

★☆☆☆☆

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