The Legend of Ben Hall

A better film than it's more famous Hollywood-produced cousin "Ned Kelly", and starting life as a crowd-funded short film, Jack Martin plays the titular anti-hero Ben Hall, who terrorised all comers in my home state of NSW, particularly around Jugiong and Forbes in the 1860's. The scenery is spectacular, even though Victorian locations (shock, horror!) stand in for NSW, and used sets from another of my all-time favourites, The Man from Snowy River to create that Australian countryside feel.

By all accounts, the film is about as historically accurate as one can be, with some of the dialogue coming from newspaper articles and eyewitness accounts. Impressive attention to detail from the filmmakers.

Bushrangers were a big part of Australian history - nice to see a homegrown film about someone other than old Ned. Sadly, without the backing of a Hollywood studio, few of my countrymen will see it.

A mildly interesting story about an Australian bush-ranger that runs about half an hour too long. Very slow moving and not-engaging. By halfway through I'd completely lost interest in finishing the film, much less the "history". Apparently, for a review to be valid, it requires 5 lines of text, but I'm not sure that there are 5 lines worth of useful thoughts on a movie where almost nothing happens in 2 hours.

The film tries to celebrate this Aussie villain by casting a charismatic demeanor to play Hall in contrast to the personality give to Happy Jack, who was portrayed as a borderline fairy with Napoleon syndrome. The film is a little dry as there was little direction as to what drives the main character after giving up on retribution pretty early on in the film. In short the film had fillers scenes that drove up the run time. In all, this is a period drama with a (true to) life lesson that to every man's downfall is a woman. The cause for the fracture between trusted friends was over a woman. 6 on a ten scale because I can't pull for villain main characters and the movie was too long. Higher than avg due to good acting performances.

Dreadful. Sceanery is nice though. Acting was appalling. The movie moved between comic, drama and utter silliness. I like Australian movies but this was a turkey. Costumes okay, script terrible. Actors had really nice teeth...... which is quite odd for the time period. Beards looked realistic, all I could think about was that least a few 'hipsters' were earning a few bucks!

Sadly, the distribution of this film is patchy, to say the least, and it will not be found in most mainstream cinemas. That is a real pity, as it is far better than many "big name" films (I'm tempted to write a spoiler here about the one we saw a few days ago) and deserves to be seen more readily. We had to travel to another town to see it.

For a film made on, essentially, a shoestring budget, the quality on all scores is excellent. The Australian bush is captured beautifully, the casting and acting is entirely credible as are the sets and production values. The script brings out good character development in the main characters and the story itself is historically accurate to the point that it could almost qualify for documentary status.

Trying hard to look for negatives, the most I could suggest is that there could have been slightly tighter editing of some of the "moody pensive" shots and horse riding. But that was a minor consideration. I also should mention the great musical score.

Definitely worth seeing to visit the Australian bush of the 1860s and to learn of one of the most legendary of our bushrangers.