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. 

 

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

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.

★★★☆☆