Mystery Road (2013)

Expected more

It's an amazing and heartbreaking story.

if their story seems completely bonkers, almost like a feverish work of fiction, you ain't heard nothing yet.

This is a dark and sometimes deeply uncomfortable drama

Each time I see another Australian film I'm convinced to NEVER visit Down Undah! What a pit of vipers! Talk about low-lives! Everyone lives in a trailer or dumpy tin roofed shack out in the boons with wild dogs, alcoholic mothers/father, drug addict siblings and friends, gambling, prostitution and winos. They mistreat ALL animals. They defecate where they eat. There are vermin everywhere--bugs, snakes, rabid mongrels. They give you that nasty dumb stare when you ask a question and then they use sarcasm answering and talk about you in the third person in front of their cronies! It's like bad high school! Who'd care to visit? It's amazing these creeps stay but I suppose the ole 'dog that I know is better...' works here too. Anyway, entertaining film with nice pace of action and some surprise but in the end he goes back to the addict shrew of an ex-wife and insolent whorish teenage daughter to try to make amends for his neglect of years ago. After you meet the wife and bitch child, you won't wonder why he left!?

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.

(56%) An outback set modern day western crime detective movie that leaves me split, maybe not in half, but split nevertheless. First of all the good things: it's brilliantly shot with stunning location work and unfussy, yet finely detailed cinematography. The performances are subdued, but perfectly solid, and this is truly something you can really get your teeth into as it sucks you into its world of dust, heat, and murk. But sadly there are some key issues here. The creeping pacing from the very moment this opens with the camera lingering on the Mystery road sign just a little too long is just way too limp for the very simple story this has to tell. it just never feels like it's getting anywhere half as quickly as it could which is evident in its running time of just over 1 hour 50, as this by all rights is a 90 minute movie. This also suffers from its sheer ordinary style of storytelling with very little in terms of surprises, no real shocks, and everything is a little too much like the direction: smooth and bold, but never anything more. Overall worth a look for those interested, but I very much doubt I'll ever want to watch it again.

-- I will say right from the out set that if you need a fast pace story running very quickly and smoothly from front to back this is likely not to be a movie you will enjoy. It starts out very slowly and seems to leave an awful lot to the viewer's mind to fill in. -- The movie starts out like it's going to be about racial bigotry, a native detective in a 99% white power structure working as a newly promoted detective returning home from a long absence at training and school. While he has been gone things have changed in the relatively small desert town, cocaine and methamphetamines have moved into the very rural area, as well as the labs that create it and the criminals who will do anything to anyone to protect it and the twisted pass times of the people in that trade. -- Even though it is slow moving it is very realistic in the form of a police investigation. In the USA we are used to directors spoon feeding us everything and running a very chronological story, but in real life investigative police work is often very slow and ponderous. I think maybe that is what this director was trying to express in his movie, but he comes very close to making the movie untenable for the average viewer in the USA. Maybe in Australia they are into this kind of movie. At any rate the movie IS very realistic in how a police investigation slowly progresses toward its goal. -- As you move along you start to realize that the murder in the start of the movie maybe part of it but the story is more about the depraved minds of these criminals and how the drug trade moves in and infects all levels of society and brings in levels of depravity never scene before by most citizens. Not only is there a drug trade going on but also a sick trade in underage kids and a serial killer that likes to use dogs and knives on his young female victims. -- And if you like true realism you will find the big shootout very satisfying. Having worked as a criminal investigator for +20 years and having been involved in a number of shooting I found the shoot out to be very realistic, to the point of running my adrenaline right up as I tried to shout advice. Now some will say the rifle shooting drug cop is unrealistic in that he simply sits in the open and has a long range sniper shoot out with a determined sniper, however you have to understand, and catch the clues in the movie, that this drug cop is either VERY deep under cover or on the take. In any case he is using drugs and that explains why he would sit in the open and duke it out with big bore rifles. -- However, after a very satisfying shoot out with the lowest form of criminals the movie does this weird thing I have seen in a lot of early movie making. It leaves you hanging and thinking, "What the..." because the director assumes that you see the same things he envisions but apparently doesn't bother to ask anyone else about to see if they agree. Or, the director is trying to leave a dramatic twist at the end that doesn't really do that well. -- Also, the ramification and results of this epic gun battle are left to us to try and fathom. All we see is the detective look at the bad guys faces and then he drives away from a scene in which, by my count, approximately 7 bad guys are killed by police gunfire, 1 officer is dead and 1 officer is wounded. And the survivor just drives away. Of course, or at least I hope that the director is just leaving the after effects to our imagination. If not then I really was lost and misunderstood everything. -- If you have watched the movie closely you may catch enough to sort of understand what he's aiming for in the last scene but it is not obvious. I had to watch the movie twice to catch some of the little details that didn't seem pertinent to movie the first time around. Then I finally understood that the detective is going home to his estranged ex-wife and teen daughter. -- So basically the movie starts out with a crime scene and slowly rolls toward the inevitable confrontation between good and bad. The whole movie appears to be pointed towards that goal, the confrontation, the shoot out at the OK corral so to speak. However after the great confrontation, after watching and waiting for this inevitable clash and watching it happen, the director turns the movie about and tries to make a dramatic family ending, but I don't think he laid a sufficient foundation for this to work well. There only a couple scenes about the family aspect and they weren't very detailed. -- It possibly sounds like I am trying to tear this movie apart but I really am not. As a cop who was disabled in such a confrontation as this movie I found it very interesting and I enjoyed trying to better understand it through the social differences. The actors are true professionals and the movie appears to have been made by professionals also. I would recommend it to anyone who likes who dunnits or cop movies. But it's not a family movie and it would be better going into it with open eyes..