From the way in which “Last Ride” has slunk into cinemas with little buzz and a meaningless poster the hopes for a thrill ride were not high. Sure enough, “Last Ride” is yet another addition to the Australian canon of mopey, maudlin films about dysfunctional arseholes. Hugo Weaving does his best with the threadbare character Kev, and Tom Russell is passable playing his son Chook (though allowances should be made for child actors given their inherent lack of experience.)
But the story is the real villain here, an ill-defined, stop-start road journey across some admittedly picturesque South Australian countryside. Because the writer has chosen to slowly drip-feed the details of why the pair are on run, the stakes are never clear or compelling. Kev and Chook spend vast amounts of time sitting around, with little sense of danger or risk enveloping them. Coupled with the low stakes is the decision to make Kev a short-tempered, violent thug, so that even the most sympathetic of audiences would find it hard to care for his fate.
So how is it that we keep churning out these low-scale dramaless dramas that have no clear reason to exist as feature films? Here’s two explanations:
- Often short films with more mood than substance are lauded by film festivals, hence the praise for director Glendyn Ivin’s short “Cracker Bag” which won the Palme D’Or at Cannes. Taking the same approach from shorts to features exposes the weaknesses of this type of storytelling. As with “Samson and Delilah” (see thoughts below), the story content in “Last Ride” could have been told in half the screen time, so we are left with long scenes of nothing much that limp the film towards 90 minutes.
- Critics often applaud films of this nature and very few have the guts to call filmmakers to task. Hence the predictable hyperbole from the “At The Movies” duo, though Jake Ryan in The Age gives a more reasonable appraisal. Honest criticism from within the film industry is rare (no doubt “Last Ride” will feature prominently in this year’s AFI awards), so the filmmakers are rarely being told directly about their work’s shortcomings.
Ultimately though the key source of the problem is the filmmakers themselves, with their lack of storytelling ambition and nous. The upcoming “The Road” may provide a fascinating case study of how an Australian director working in the Hollywood system tells a father/son road journey, with stakes that are as high as their very own survival.
