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Just perfect...

I like movies that are aware of what they are selling... without [any] greater aspirations than to make people laugh and that's it.

This is a tender, generous movie that likes its characters and presents them as real people, full of flaws and strengths.

When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

After watching the superb "ripped from the headlines" Aussie Noir mini-series Deep Water recently,I read reviews by a fellow IMDber. Nearing the end of a page,I noticed a tantalising Aussie Noir title.Finding the name of the flick familiar,I found out that it was about to air on TV! Which led to me going down the mystery road.The plot:Returning to his old small town where his ex-wife and daughter live, aboriginal Detective Jay Swan is sent to investigate the body of an aboriginal teenage girl found at an "unofficial pit-stop." Learning that her name was Julie Mason,Swan finds out that Mason was an addict,who was a hooker that had sex with truckers at the stop. Searching for info from Mason's pals,Swan tracks down her phone,and finds messages from his daughter. Whilst trying to find out what his daughter is caught up in,Swan begins to notice that a number of his fellow officers appear very keen in stopping from going down a road that gets to the heart of the case,and the town.View on the film:Retaining the way he could give a calm situation an underlying sense of menace in the first Matrix flick, Hugo Weaving gives a chilling performance as cop Johnno,whose "friendly" small-talk and shoulder taps to Swan crackle with a sinister unease,whilst Ryan Kwanten (minus his fake Deep South accent from True Blood) gives a creepy performance as Pete Bailey,with Kwanten using space to open the uncomfortable mood between Bailey and Swan. Gliding in wearing cowboy boots and hat, Aaron Pedersen gives a marvellous performance as lone Noir "cowboy" Jay Swan,as Pedersen gives Swan a Noir gravitas over the horrific treatment of fellow aboriginals,with a rebellious kick to clear the town of all the outlaws standing on the road.Stroking the brittle Noir tension with coiled crane shots scanning the decayed wilderness for figures wanting Swan to not uncover the full mystery,writer/director/editor/cinematographer/composer Ivan Sen breaths unrelenting dread into the landscape,with lingering looks at Swan's face displaying the shot of anxiety cast across his face,as Swan finds himself a Noir loner in a town that wants to keep its mystery.Hitting Swan with bullets of racism,the screenplay by Sen exposes the mistreatment of aboriginals in its rawest form,where people who live in run-down housing projects are treated like dirt,and Swan's aboriginal roots are mercilessly leaned on for threats. Pulling Mason's body from the roadside,Swan drives down a cracking Noir mystery Thriller. Limiting the violence to short rounds of bloodshed,Sen brilliantly uses the scorching hot setting to give the dialogue a heaviness that is pulled by the murky underbelly that Swan finds under the mystery road.

There was a lot that was good in this film, but a few sour notes brought it down a little. The good: First and foremost, Pedersen's performance is great. He is in every scene and certainly carries the film. He is supported by the cream of Australian acting to tell an excellent story of crime and corruption in the outback. Finally, we get treated to some great cinematography of the Australian terrain with wide horizons and gorgeous sunrise/sunsets. The bad: It's slow. There are a lot of scenes of people just staring off into the distance, looking at the ground or doing other things and not talking or doing anything else. This leads to it being a little difficult to tell what is happening and there are some unanswered questions - such as who's side was Jonhno (Hugo Weaving) on? He was a cop that knew about the drugs but didn't arrest those involved. He helped Jay Swan at the end, but didn't start shooting until the fight had already begun? Was the police chief in on it? Finally, after everyone has been shot, there is no follow up. Jay Swan just goes home without filling out any paperwork or any other cop like activities which one would think would happen. This would have been handy to clarify what happened.

All of us want to be genuinely ourselves, and nearly all of us are at the mercy of societal imprints with urges so great we cannot escape them. Few of us can be calm in ourselves.I suppose this is one reason we seek films that are genuine and/or characters that are whole. Characters that are broken can make for good stories, but that is a different sort of compulsive draw for a film. Here, I think what this filmmaker attempted was the notion of genuine being in a genuine artifact.The *being* first. The main character here is an aborigine who as a detective can act as the unflinching driver of a procedural, the man of the earth who knows the place and people... plus the typical hero in an American western who comes into town and disrupts the gang who owns it. Other commenters like this actor and the way he moves in a modern western form.I am a viewer from the US, and I have some trouble with this. I do see the cleanliness of the project; one can appreciate the fact that the writer is also the director, cinematographer and editor. It is genuinely artisanal in that respect. But it lacks any reflection of the filmmaker's personality, as do say Clint Eastwood's films in a similar vein. It cleaves too much to an American western in fact, and for this viewer there was nothing distinctly Australian in it.Other than accent, the racists were not different than bozos within a few miles of me here. The shootout was too clean an ending for such a (relatively) complex story. So the film did not seem genuine because it gave the impression of being appropriated in nearly all respects, including the blocking.And the hero did not strike me as genuine either. I assume most Australian viewers would know the popular fictional Black Australian detective Bony who worked in the same area. He would encounter the same racist barriers but be quite a bit more intellectually deductive than our guy here. All the guy here seems to do is persist, where Bony is a sort of Poirot in tune with the land. It would have worked better with one of those amazing, unique faces, color and stride that are distinct in Oz.

Going by the reviews i thought this one would be a top notch thriller.To my surprise the movie is slow paced and makes you fall asleep .I literally slept twice in the first 50 minutes.The acting in the movie is what keep you going and asking for more.The direction could have been much better but the actors have done justice to whatever screen space they could get .The director confuses a very good plot with some unnecessary twists and turns which don't make sense at all.Over all the movie offers some amazing shots of Australia ,i wish i could say the same thing about the entire movie.Its definitely not in the A- league but can be a time killer as it was for me on a laid back Sunday!