Tag Archives: Justin Kurzel

The Hills Have Lies

The Order

by George Wolf

Director Justin Kurzel announced his presence with authority in 2011 via The Snowtown Murders, a debut that showed the Aussie in full command of crafting a true crime story that pulsates with tension and simmering evil.

Kurzel’s setting is now the U.S., but he’s on familiar ground – and delivering similar results – with The Order, based on the violent domestic terror movement profiled in the 1990 book The Silent Brotherhood.

Jude Law is fantastic as Terry Husk, an FBI agent sent to Idaho to investigate a series of violent bank robberies across the Pacific Northwest. With some help from local lawman Jamie Bowen (Tye Sheridan), Husk becomes convinced that the heists are meant to bankroll the work of domestic terrorists planning to wage a race war and eventually overthrow the U.S. government.

He’s right, of course, and Marc Maron’s early appearance as talk radio host Alan Berg will help jog some memories. The crimes were the work of The Order, a white supremacist group led by Bob Mathews (Nicholas Hoult, who’s having a helluva year). Mathews broke away from Aryan Nation founder Richard Butler to pursue a more violent agenda, and connecting these two faces of the same evil is just one of the ways Kurzel keeps the history lesson gripping and vital.

“Just be patient,” Butler implores Mathews. “In ten years we’ll have members in Congress. That’s how you make change.”

You bet that line hangs pretty damn heavy in the air, but screenwriter Zach Baylin (King Richard, Creed III) never overplays his ominous hand. The relevance of this case hardly needs a neon sign to mark it, and Baylin and Kurzel favor a more nuanced reflection that can attack the present that much harder.

That’s not to say the film is not intense. Even if you could ignore all the true in these crimes, the procedural and manhunting layers of the story (especially once Jurnee Smollett arrives with FBI backup) make for a compelling thriller on their own. Kurzel engineers some crackling car chases and shootouts, while the entire ensemble – led by Law’s tortured outrage and Hoult’s sociopathic charm – boasts grit and authenticity.

In short, The Order is another example of Kurzel’s skill as a craftsman. He again re-imagines case history with the taut instincts of a narrative storyteller, leaving nothing but hard, compelling truths behind.

Kelly Green

True History of the Kelly Gang

by George Wolf

Planting its flag unapologetically at the corner of accuracy and myth, The True History of the Kelly Gang reintroduces a legendary 1870s folk hero through consistently bold and compelling strokes.

His death imminent, Australian outlaw Ned Kelly (1917‘s George MacKay in another impressive turn) is writing a letter to the daughter he will most likely never see. With a promise to “burn if I speak false,” Kelly wants his child to separate fact from fiction in the family history.

It’s an audacious, somewhat cheeky opening from director Justin Kurzel, considering that the film itself is based on a historical novel. Kurzel and screenwriter Shaun Grant – the duo behind the true crime shocker The Snowtown Murders nine years ago – go bigger this time, trading spare intimacy for a tableau of grand visual and narrative ideas.

After a heroic act in childhood, Ned gets the chance at a proper education. That offer is spurned by his angry and defiant mother (Essie Davis, terrific), who instead passes Ned off to notorious Aussie bushranger Harry Power (Russel Crowe in a sterling cameo) for an intro into the outlaw life.

With a direct nod to the moment when “the myth is more profitable than the man,” Kurzel spins an irresistible yarn that manages to balance the worship of its hero with some condemnation for his sins. And as the road to Kelly’s guns-blazing capture unfurls, the film incorporates elements of both a tense crime thriller and a Nightingale-esqe reminder of savage colonialism.

Does the legend of Ned Kelly owe more to history or myth? Hero or murderer? True History…. aims higher than one word answers, with storytelling that often soars before landing.

Cinema Killed the Video Star

Assassin’s Creed

by Hope Madden

What does it take to make a worthwhile movie based on a video game? Because it isn’t just talent – Assassin’s Creed proves that.

Like Warcraft, Creed pits a genuinely gifted director against all that terrible cinematic history – from 1992’s Super Mario Brothers through the Resident Evil series to this year’s Angry Birds Movie – and comes up lacking.

Australian director Justin Kurzel quietly proved his mettle with an astonishing true crime horror film in 2011 called Snowtown. Last year, he teamed up with Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard – authentic talents if ever there were – for an imaginative and bloody take on Shakespeare’s Macbeth.

And now the three re-team, along with time-tested craftsmen Jeremy Irons, Brendan Gleeson and Charlotte Rampling, to adapt the popular time traveling video game.

Fassbender is Cal, a death row convict secretly saved by the Abstergo science lab. There, Dr. Sofia Rikkin (Cotillard) will use him to channel his ancestor Aguilar (also Fassbender) – member of a shadowy team battling the Knights Templar for the freedom of humanity.

So, we bounce back and forth in time between a modern day SciFi story and a dusty Inquisition-era adventure. Cal struggles against his newfound captivity and the after-effects of the experiments; Aguilar parkours his way through ancient Spain, trying to keep the Templar from the apple that started all our troubles back in Eden.

If the problem here is not talent, what, then?

As usual, it begins with the writing. Kurzel works with his Macbeth collaborator Michael Lesslie, as well as ne’er do wells Adam Cooper and Bill Collage (Allegiant, Exodus: Gods and Kings). They put together a story that’s as convoluted and bloated as it is superficial.

The cast gets little opportunity to do anything other than deliver dour lines with stone faces, each one developing less of a sense of character than what you would have actually found in the video game itself.

Kurzel’s no help, his mirthless presentation undermining thrills at every turn. When he isn’t bombarding the action with murky visual effects, he’s pulling the audience from the midst of a climactic battle and back into the lab to watch Cotillar and/or Irons look on with clinical interest.

Yawn.

Maybe it’s impossible to capture the visceral thrill of gaming within the comparatively passive experience of cinema. Maybe the rich backstories of modern video games are only rich if you’re used to video game narratives. Hopefully the movies will get it right at some point, or at least they’ll stop wasting such incredible talent on such forgettable nonsense.

Verdict-2-0-Stars





The Snowtown Murders

The Snowtown Murders (2011)

Very quietly, Australia is putting out some of the most troublingly honest films on earth, The Snowtown Murders among them.

First time filmmaker Justin Kurzel’s movie bears more than a passing resemblance to 2010 Aussie import Animal Kingdom. Both boast unreasonably realistic performances focused on Australia’s seedier side; both examine one family’s functional disregard for the law; both hinge on the relationship between a charismatic psychopath and a quiet, wayward teen.

But Kurzel’s film, unfortunately, mines a true story.

John Bunting tortured and killed eleven people during his spree in South Australia in the Nineties. We only watch it happen once on film, but that’s more than enough.

The director seems less interested in the lurid details of Bunting’s brutal violence than he is in the complicated and alarming nature of complicity. Ironically, this less-is-more approach may be why the movie leaves you so shaken.

An unflinching examination of a predator swimming among prey, Snowtown succeeds where many true crime films fail because of its understatement, its casual observational style, and its unsettling authenticity. More than anything, though, the film excels due to one astounding performance.

Daniel Henshall cuts an unimpressive figure on screen – a round-faced, smiling schlub. But he brings Bunting an amiability and confrontational fearlessness that provides insight into what draws people to a sadistic madman.

There’s not a false note in his chilling turn, nor in the atmosphere Kurzel creates of a population aching for a man – any adult male to care for them, protect them and tell them what to do.

Once he has the trust of his neighbors in this low-income suburb, Bunting picks and chooses: who dies, who helps, who lives another day. What begins as exceedingly brutal neighborhood vigilantism turns quickly to a sort of thinning of the herd, and eventually to simple, unfathomably horrific entertainment.

The Snowtown Murders is a slow boil, and painfully tense. It’s hard to watch and harder to believe, but as a film, it offers a powerful image of everyday evil that will be hard to shake.