Following the critical and commercial success of his 2010 debut feature Animal Kingdom, all eyes were on David Michôd to see if he could repeat the success with his follow up, The Rover. Although his attempt was admirable, and the resulting film is by no means terrible, there are a lot of problems with The Rover that will leave those hoping for more of the same disappointed.
Set in the unforgiving, barren wilderness of an Australia ten years after a global financial collapse, The Rover is the story of Eric, a mysterious, brooding loner hell-bent on retrieving the car that was stolen from him by a trio of thieves. Having crashed their own getaway car, Archie, Caleb and Henry take the vehicle to continue their escape from a botched robbery in which Henry’s brother Rey is shot and left behind to die. As Eric continues on his mission to retrieve the car, his and Rey’s paths cross, and together they head South towards a town in which the three criminals have holed up in.
As Eric, the hugely underrated Guy Pearce is brilliant in a demanding role. Although largely silent, he is at constant boiling point, ready to explode with rageful vengeance at any moment. Robert Pattinson is a little too Karl-from-Slingbladey for comfort as Rey. Although his performance is at times very believable, particularly on occasions when his needy character seeks the approval of Eric, he is altogether not quite right for what is a key role in the film.
It has lazily been compared to the Mad Max films, but shares very little in common with them, other than it being a futuristic film set in Australia. It is more heavily influenced by the sixties and seventies Westerns with its mostly silent leading man, explosions of violence amidst periods of inactivity, and social setting where the rules of civilized society appear to be almost non-existent. There is more than a little Cormac McCarthy too, with several tense, bloody scenes echoing the writer’s best work. It is visually and tonally similar to another antipodean, Guy Pearce vehicle, the brilliant The Proposition. Although that film is set in the Australian outback during Victorian times, the land is as harsh and life is equally cheap.
A tense opening fifteen minutes promises a huge amount, writing a huge cheque that the rest of the film can’t quite cash. Beautiful cinematography and a brooding atmosphere might carry you through a short film, but over 100 minutes it leaves the audience starved. The Rover quickly descends into a bizzaro-world Rain Man as the two men head across country, slowly growing closer day by day. Whilst there is a lot to appreciate here, there is very little to actually care about. If any lessons are to be taken away from this by Michôd, it is that perhaps not everything malevolent is remarkably significant.
As far as difficult second albums go, The Rover is probably more Yeah Yeah Yeahs than Guillemots. That is to say, rather than a career-ending disaster, it is more just a respectable misfire from a writer/director who still shows an awful lot of promise.
The Rover will be shown at Broadway Cinema until Thursday 28 August 2013.
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