Review of Romper Stomper (1992) by Nathan K — 27 Sep 2009

The most difficult aspect for a director when approaching a film like Romper Stomper must surely be how to position the audience. As the main characters are those we ipso facto find abhorrent, the director faces a delicate task of at once allowing us to, to a certain degree, sympathise and empathise with these characters, while at the same time maintaining a critical distance from them so as not to appear to be advocating their lifestyle. The central problem for Romper Stomper is that it does not do justice to either of those aims.

While we follow the skinhead characters almost exclusively the majority of them are defined exclusively by their membership to the group; there are a few with speaking roles, but they are all virtually interchangeable â?? though one is a child, a couple are girls etc. While that may be a symptom of skinheads in general, in the film they come off more as cannon fodder: they are there to increase the numbers in the gang primarily for the fight scenes. This would not necessarily be a problem if the main characters in the film were interesting enough, but unfortunately apart from the Davey character, they are not. While Russell Crowe is very effective as the leader of the group, he seems only to have two modes: either he is silent and brooding or he is psychotic and fighting. The Jacqueline McKenzie character is given much of the screen time and the character development, but despite of the incestuous relationship with her father, she is largely forgettable. It is only in the Davey character that the tension between empathy and disgust is truly felt: while we see him do horrible things, the actor always manages to incorporate a certain hesitance which works to mitigate our disapprobation.

Due to the general failure to really offer us intriguing characters, the film definitely trails off in the last half. Once the intensity of the opening scenes have dissipated (and they are very intense which is partly due to the nature of the subject but also the gritty quality of the production), we are left with the love triangle of the three main characters. Unfortunately these scenes are not nearly as engaging as what proceeded them.