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A nostalgic addition to Ozploitation, enjoyable and recounting a confident past. Big city cop Shane Cooper (Ryan Kwanten) relocates due to the increasing demands of his wife (Claire van der Boom). That day, Jimmy Conway (Tommy Lewis), an old Aboriginal with a Red Hill vendetta, escapes jail and heads straight back into town looking for blood. It’s obvious that Jimmy isn’t planning to kill everyone otherwise, the innocent hero, who gets the brunt of the attack, wouldn’t be left alive while the sheriff’s (Steve Bisley) armed army of followers is shot at. Although a loose history of what crime was committed against him would be reasonable to presume, Shane takes a bit to sort through it all. It’s exceedingly difficult to see how a written confession binds everything in a neat little parcel. Hughes seems to carry out the action in a stimulating way. The scene is set at a uniform pace to better depict the slaughter as Jimmy strolls through it like an angel of vengeance. However, there are several great shocks.
Exciting the elements of a thrilling mystery, an approaching storm, the sheriff’s reluctance to get the backup he desperately needs, and quite astonishingly, a great panther mythological as it may be saunters into the film at a pivotal moment which so happens to be true.
There are elements of the Western genre, and It is also heavily inspired by David Morell’s First Blood in some parts, but Hughes gives it a lot more of an Australian approach. For example, the sheriff’s dismissal of the female character trying to bring more attention to the town’s stagnant economy via a wine and food festival makes for some Australian humor when he says his ancestors where no soldiers won the land for autotrophs to drink Pinot. Along with Jimmy’s disposal of two of the nastier posse members using an Aboriginal spear and historical display boomerang. The boomerang is delivered with a strike through an offscreen sound effect just before it claps into Jimmy’s palm, which is brilliant. He showers himself in glory along with Kwanten who suffered a horrifying sequence of wounds enjoying a long list of activities like spending some time in a fridge plummeting off a cliff getting drenched in a storm and being cuffed to a bench when the big cat appears. He breaks his hand so to speak, as he most definitely does take the risk of portraying a subplot regarding his reluctance of being surrounded by so many lunatics with trained fingers sitting on triggers. Of course, the payoff comes when he must take a rest in the same face-off with two wry villains who arrive on horseback and for the show reminds us that somewhere beneath all that heroic reluctance is a world of awed including for those who can’t do.
Lewis, who played Jimmie Blacksmith in the groundbreaking film The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, seems to be reprising his greatest role. He is an iconic figure, especially with the scars, but a flashback or two tends to overly sentimentalize his victimhood in a way that the film doesn’t need because the performance, which has no dialogue until a final dying line does the job already. Bisley is also a local film legend, who was Mad Max’s sidekick in the original film and encompasses the type of profane, angry, wry Ocker we used to see a lot of in 1970s movies. In this film, he is a genial villain who also provides comic relief with his constant insults of the less masculine.
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