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Lack of good storyline.

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.

This film comes oh so very close to being a genuine attempt at Australian urban drama but its let down by absolutely awful acting on behalf of one or two actors that really distracts from some amazing acting and genuinely menacing Zeus and some hugely over choreographed fight scenes that belong in a Hollywood shot em up action flick not in a realistic urban drama. the other problem is that Australia has many different types of youth gang from the traditional American/English types to biker and surfer gangs the main reason why these youths are involved in gangs and thug lifestyle is not to do with poverty and horrible circumstances (although I'm sure that is the case some of the time) the vast majority of it seems to be bored teens replicating what they see on TV and hear in rap music in fact most of the people in this movie come from beautiful suburban neighbourhoods drive nice cars and have expensive clothes they come across as obnoxious posers who have no sense of national identity which is of course the point of the film anyway but you just cant help feel thats its pointless to point a camera at a group of rich kids who live in paradise and say "look their pretending to ghetto kids" because everyone accept them can see it anyway and one day their going to look back and cringe at how they used to behave if they're mature enough and mange to survive the little world they've created. thankfully there is more to the story than that, there's racial tension which oddly isn't usually a component of an urban drama so in itself could of been ground braking but its weighed down too heavily by the main clichéd urban drama story of big brother former hood sees little brother going down same route which lead him to jail and must delve in to save his brother (bullet boy, green street, American history X) in short this wants to stand up next to the big boys of the genre (Boyz N The Hood, Menace 2 Society, Babylon, Bullet Boy, La Haine, City Of God, Tribu) but in the end is overly choreographed badly acted and in the end doesn't really have a lot to say about what is probably the most civilised western nations problems of young suburban Asian Australian men imitating black American/British men whilst using race as a subplot (which in itself seems like a total hypocrisy) still worth a look to see a real side of Australia that is scarcely represented on screen and does leave you hoping the Australian film makers realise there are story's to be told in the suburbs with real people in real circumstances and despite what Australia thinks the rest of the English speaking world have no problem understanding their accents and dialects we watch neighbours, home and away, prisoner cell block H, chopper, mad max and much more just as much as we do home grown material and frankly its an insult to our intelligence and to Australians themselves to think otherwise.

I wanted to watch something boring. I chose to watch The Combination. The beginning didn't promise me much, I even had to check if this was an Australian film, and actually it was! I am neither Australian nor Lebanese, but I have met both cultures for at least a brief moment in my lifetime. So the question when watching a story of Lebanese in Australia was: are the facts just? Is this real? It is. Although people are depicted differently from those I have seen in the real world, parts of them that are true and up to a point are also shown.Is the material educative? Yes. You can remember your history lessons, fighting skills, and how to be romantic.Will you be bored? I was not.

This is a horrible film made to glorify Lebanese gangsters as hero's. Not to mention the acting is just stupid most of the time. Most of this film contains young Lebanese men purporting that their way of life is somehow more meaningful then those who obey laws and regulation of a country.Before a film showing Lebanese youth as hardcore gangsters, I think the creator should consider perhaps making a film based on a Australian-Lebanese people in a love story, its a better start to a Australian film industry in the eyes of the rest of the world.My advice is to rent a Bollywood musical instead, you'll feel better about life at the end of it.

Mention that catch phrase, "Australian values" and you will only be taken seriously by the rather unpleasant Nazi types who whipped up the Cronula anti Lebanese riots a couple of years ago (They were referred to briefly in the "Bra Boys" documentary narrated by Russel Crowe and form a back drop to the dramatic culmination of this film). John (George Basha), the hero in "Combination" dismisses Australian values as no more substantial than football and beer drinking.But the film makes the case for an Australian culture, Australian values that exclude the use of guns and vendettas as a means of settling conflict. The heroine's father tells his daughter, Sydney (Clare Bowen), that he was threatened by a Lebanese worker whom he had to dismiss from his job some years ago. He has no objection against the Lebanese people who have transformed his neighbourhood – just the fact that guns are now a commonplace item in the community in which he raised her. That is not a cheap shot by a bigot. It is a reasonable statement of fact. The hero of the film contemplates killing the criminal who has murdered his brother. He is encouraged to do so by the killer's neighbours when he confronts him, gun in hand. But he rejects the idea and (hopefully) renders his brother's killer impotent by publicly humiliating him. That is an example of Australian values. It is a valid difference between the more unpleasant aspects of the culture in Lebanon and that in Australia and it is worth celebrating. "Combination" does just that in a remarkable and satisfying manner.There is another really affirming idea embodied in the script, written by the George Basha, the Lebanese-Australian lead actor. It is an aboriginal Australian who councils him against a vendetta and provides the assistance necessary to extricate himself and his brother from the criminal milieu in which they have become mired The one thing that all the people who criticize Baz Lurhman's film, "Australia", fail to perceive is that it demands that all Australians recognize that the Aboriginal inhabitants have had a set of values (culture) for thousands of years that could be held up as instructive for those who have settled on their land. It is a rare thing to see this virtue celebrated in Australian literature. "Combination" seems to reinforce that notionBut all this may make the film sound preachy and sanctimonious. It is anything but that. It contains uniformly fabulous performances, script and direction that give the film narrative momentum and cinematography and sound that transports the viewer into the locales in which it was filmed. Director David Field, who created that wonderful character Acko in Gregor Jordan's film "Two Hands" some years ago, gives Basha the necessary space to concoct a character whose smouldering, barely restrained, macho authority brings to mind Richard Burton as Jimmy Porter in "Look Back in Anger" or Marlon Brando as Stanley Kowalski in "Streetcar Named Desire". His direction has more of the operatic tone of an Elia Kazan "Streetcar" than the laid back bravura of a Gregor Jordan – Brian Brown "Two Hands", but let's put that down to the hot blooded Leb culture he is portraying on the screen. Clare Bowen's touching portrayal of a fresh faced young Aussie girl is a world away from Vivien Leigh's jaded Blanche or (perhaps more appropriately) Kim Hunter's Stella. But it is none the less powerful for that. Such is the quality of the script she is given to perform, that it does not take much to imagine her parents being seduced by the virtues of the Lebanese culture with which she has been smitten. The exotic cuisine, the foot stomping, hypnotic dance, the loyalty to family. Wed that to the virtues of an Australian culture that embraced and absorbed more Jewish victims of Nazi concentration camps than any other country and turned Melbourne into the second largest Greek city in the world and you have a flawed but none the less worthy place to bring up the child gestating in Sydney's womb. Surely that is worthy of celebration When a country's film industry can not only document the problems it faces but also suggest ways in which they can be overcome with such a keen eye and in such an entertaining manner, things can't be as bad as the Nazi types would like to have you believe. As Rampaging Roy Slaven, that other Australian prophetic voice would say, "This is a good news story"Bravo "Combination" You really rock!