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Cactus In Cinemas on Thursday 1^st MayRunning Time: 89in. Director: Jasmine Yuen-CarracunStarring: Travis McMahon, David Lyons, Bryan Brown and Shane JacobsonWhen this film started I was so excited that I was watching an Australian movie starring Bryan Brown that appeared to have an urban setting, I saw the bright lights of the city. This should be interesting I thought, and then the film shifted and we were in the outback ***again***. I should confess that I’d spent the week prior to watching this film rewriting my PhD thesis as a book. My thesis is about Australian Cinema – I’m one of those people that like it and think we've grown beyond the masculinist identity and can compete in an international arena. Anyway, I really wanted to like Cactus, maybe even love it and I didn’t read anything about it before going in. But I left feeling cold and confused. Cold because I didn’t really care about the characters and what happened to them, if anything I hoped for ill fate to befall them all. I was confused because visually it was an excellent piece of work but honestly I had no idea what motivated the characters. But, of course, Bryan Brown was great as were the actors in the main roles. Look out for the small role played by Shane Jacobson of Kenny fame.

This is a road movie about first time kidnapper John Kelly and the man he is hired to kidnap and deliver (to who??) professional gambler Eli Jones. There is so little exposition in this film; we don’t know what Eli has done to warrant being driven across the Australian outback and John’s situation seems like an afterthought. I couldn’t empathise and the disconnect between what he was doing and who he apparently really is was too huge for me to believe it. Usually I love a road movie, especially one that disrupts the conventions of the genre, like Heaven’s Burning and Kiss or Kill (also two aussie flicks) where the two main characters are a man and a woman rather than two blokes. Unfortunately there are no women in this film really (other than the copper’s barmaid wife and John’s wife at home with his daughter). The landscape does look beautiful and Bonnie the red Ford in Holden territory really does steal the show! 

While I didn’t enjoy the film for its entertainment value I did appreciate its visual beauty and reworking of the buddy film in the Australian context. See it if only to support independent budget filmmaking in Australia. Overall, I’d say this would have been an excellent short film – 17 minutes at the most but I wonder if that has more to do with my concentration levels these days.