NED KELLY
Starring Heath Ledger, Naomi Watts, Orlando Bloom.
Directed by Gregor Jordan.
Reviewed by Reuben Ham
April 4, 2003
Gregor Jordan’s would-be national epic is ultimately more attractive for the mythical idea of its eponymous hero than for its technical execution. The only actor given opportunity here for something more than camp or window-dressing is Ledger himself, who could be Laurence Olivier or Martin Lawrence and not wring any more or less emotion from his audience in the title role, such is the tragic fatalism inherent in this already-well-known plot.
Ned Kelly (Heath Ledger) is an Irish-blooded boy punching and drinking his way into manhood in colonial Australia, tenderly taking care of his mother and siblings yet tangling with local cops due to his vigilante-style sense of justice. Partly due to the similarly aggressive chivalry of his cohorts – including brother Dan (Laurence Kinlan) and best friend Joe Byrne (Orlando Bloom) – Ned is heinously framed for assault by corrupt enforcers, and compelled to either capitulate to a confederation of cowards or flee with his honour intact.
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The second act involves an all-in caper across Australian Tourist Board-approved terrain, in which close-ups of lorikeets or kookaburras burst out of the bloodshed, and in which Ned becomes increasingly dirty, increasingly bearded, and increasingly popular among the very bank clerks he is robbing. Eventually, police heavy Francis Hare (Geoffrey Rush, in the kind of role his reanimated corpse could play if it fell asleep on-set) receives word that there are only thirty minutes left in the film, and that he’d better round up a hundred blue-boys and corner the Kelly Gang in a Glenrowan hotel because the audience has waited long enough for the only genuinely thrilling scene in the picture.
It is the ensuing climactic shootout which single-handedly seals the Kelly legend; indeed, the sight of Ned standing alone in his homemade armour cutting down crooked policemen while being fired upon from four-hundred different directions simultaneously is an irrepressible heart-rush. It’s all a gloriously bloody, soggy mess, and you’ll leave the cinema breathlessly incensed at the death of the tin-helmeted one at the age of 25. More’s the pity, then, that the preceding two-thirds of the film are the equivalent of emotional souffle, shot through with an almost drunken lack of tonal control.
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Ned’s romance with an aristocratic settler (Naomi Watts) seems shoehorned into the script twenty minutes before shooting, so painfully stilted is the interaction between the two. This subplot’s nadir is thankfully reached early in the film, as the soon-to-be lovers bond over the cleaning-out of a horse’s urethra in a scene more reminiscent of FREDDY GOT FINGERED than WUTHERING HEIGHTS. Watts, in particular, treads cinematic water so embarrassingly that one suspects she is present merely as an excuse for promos to trumpet “the up-and-coming star of such recent successes as MULHOLLAND DRIVE and THE RING.”
In short, Gregor Jordan and Co. should be thankful that Ned isn’t still alive, as he may well have held them to siege until celluloid justice had been somewhat restored.
If you’d like to read Reuben’s interview with NED KELLY co-star and ATTACK OF THE CLONES’ “Uncle Owen,” Joey Edgerton, click here.
Images courtesy of Ned Kelly The Movie.com.
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