With how many films I get through every year, marketing material and trailers in particular don’t really have an effect on me nowadays. Most of the time, trailers just serve as snapshots for stuff I know I’ll be looking at at some point anyway, so they don’t serve the same interest for me that they would most general audiences. But then there are situations like the marketing around this film, and the subsequent response that the film proper has gotten, and I feel the need to address the discrepancy.
See, the trailer for this film presents it as some kind of crime thriller with shootouts, the kind of thing you’d expect Neeson to have helmed a few years back. But instead, the actual film is more of a slow-burn drama about family, masculinity, and how far men will go to preserve one or the other.
When broken down, the story (written by 1%’s Matt Nable, who also co-stars and makes his directorial debut here) is about three men: Ryan (Sam Worthington), Johnny (Matt Nable), and Billy (Edward Carmody).
When I saw Avatar: The Way Of Water on official detail (or, more specifically, when I went and saw a 10-minute preview on official detail), I also caught a live Q&A with Worthington and Cliff Curtis. Worthington got to talking about how his own experiences of becoming a father in-between films influenced his performance in it. Considering there was a noticeable improvement in his efforts with the second film, I was hoping that his turn here as an ex-SAS soldier dealing with being a single parent would continue with that inspiration.
And honestly, I’d say that it does. He mainly plays the part of grieving partner and traumatised warrior as a shell covering the space where a sense of feeling should be, which means that he gets by primarily on looking and acting dead inside (no cheap jokes here, folx; he just does well with it). But early on especially, he at least establishes that that’s a choice on his part in later scenes, between his genuinely cute moments with his wife Justine (Phoebe Tonkin), and scenes with Gilbert Bradman as a young Billy that create the foundation of the later examinations of masculinity and honesty.
As for Johnny, Ryan’s former SAS brother-in-arms, we get a more extreme version of that soul chasm. Nable doubles-up on the emotional intensity he brought to 1%, portraying a man who has since fallen deep into the criminal element because… well, there’s not a lot of other options for someone who’s been taught to survive by any means necessary, even if it means bloodshed. The last third especially shows him really give his all to the role, absolutely breaking down in tears at the pain of his life while Mick Fleetwood plays in the background; powerful stuff.
And then there’s Billy, Ryan’s son, and the nexus point around which Ryan lets himself be influenced by Johnny in order to keep Billy out of trouble. Carmody, admittedly, is the weakest performer here (even Phoebe Tonkin, both as his actual mother and as Ryan’s feminine conscience, leaves a more lasting impact), but the depiction he gives of a teenager struggling with grief and abandonment issues hit some soft spots for me. Not to completely give the game away, but there’s some particular shots of him alone that… fucking hell, it hurts that I can relate to this.
Nable’s direction and writing, while good, are rather par for the course when it comes to Aussie crime dramas: Gritty, downbeat, contrasting the beauty of the Sydney coast with the grunginess of the people living near it. But like with the works of Joel Edgerton, I’d argue that the familiarity of the story guts can be forgiven because the delivery works more times than not. It’s not all that exciting, but as a low-key tri-fold character drama, it’s still pretty damn effective and has a pay-off more than solid enough to pay off the slow-burn lead-up to it. Matt Nable seems to be steadily improving as a film creative, and I’ll definitely be keeping an eye out for what he does next.
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