Review of Australia (2008) by Jeff B — 17 Aug 2010

If Crocodile Dundee had gone down on James Cameron?s Titanic, it may very well have looked like Australia. Lushly realized and far-reachingly ambitious, this epic laudably integrates so many checkmark boxes of Australian culture that, at times, it feels like a tourism video. It also features some pithy dialogue and highly dodgy plot points that harken back to a certain epic concerning a doomed oceanliner. Just as with that particular epic, however, this spectacle is worth the price of admission?especially if John Q. Filmgoer has a mute button.

Director Baz Luhrmann?s latest PG-13-rated film, the ?30s-spanning epic Australia, chronicles the friendship between a widowed Outback rancher (Kidman) and her ranch hand (Jackman) as they drive a cattle herd to port on the eve of the bombing of Darwin during World War II.

Unapologetically old fashioned, Luhrmann stokes this long-burning fire with a stoker borrowed from the Golden Age of H?Wood (think: Scarlet and Rhett throwing shrimp on the barbie). Intentionally, the film boasts an overly romantic and visually sumptuous feast for the audience?but this proves to be a double-edged sword. Though not exactly boring, the picture runs an ass-numbingly long 165 minutes. Though appropriately cast (especially considering their Aussie lineage), Kidman and Jackman spout lines so wooden that filmgoers can actually hear the dusty Outback wind sweep through their heads. Their characters also seem to enter the frame at the most of opportune of times, waltzing into the action JUST in the knick of time to a ridiculously dramatic musical cue.

Bottom line: Not quite a piece of Crikey.