The Tender Hook

THE BOXER AND THE BOMBSHELL (AKA TENDER HOOK) is a strange little film from Australia by writer/director Jonathan Ogilvie. Strange, because it has so many fine attributes - cinematography, use of enhancing black and white period film into semi-colored film to bridge the gap between centuries, some very fine imagery, and a cast of strong actors. Everything seems to be in place for this film, including the manner in which the film begins - giving the audience an insight as to where the coming story will take us - except that Ogilvie fails to create memorable characters about whom we care. In many ways this is like a vaudeville show with many disconnected acts that move past our eyes so quickly that each is easily forgotten. The movie tries very hard to be unique, but it only succeeds in being a transiently memorable recreation of Australia in the mob controlled 1920s.

Following WW I and in the wake of the tragedies suffered, a gang headed by boss McHeath (Hugo Weaving) is in the boxing scam, horse race fixing, and the drug and booze market. A Japanese beer maker Hackett (Kuni Hashimoto) imports beer for the black market and falls out of favor with McHeath. McHeath's two main men - Donnie (Tyler Coppin) and Ronnie (John Batchelor) obey McHeath's orders but have their own agendas. McHeath keeps a moll named Iris (Rose Byrne) who cheers McHeath on while snorting cocaine. This little uninteresting way of life finally comes alive with the entry of young promising boxer Art Walker (Matthew Le Nevez - an interesting and talented new face) who cares for his older brother who suffers form the stress of having served in the Great War. McHeath has a boxer he is training to fix matches, Alby (Luke Carroll), and McHeath brings on Art to be his sparing partner. At the first fight the public deride Alby because of his race and Alby is dismissed leaving Art to take focus. Iris is attracted to Art but also feels tied to McHeath: to get Art out of the picture Iris slips cocaine into Art's lemonade before a fight and Art of course loses the important fight. From there it is a competition among all the cast - McHeath wants control and attention (he sings songs in the ring before the fights! and controls the people around him by terror and murder. How Art manages to cope with being a fight fixer versus keeping with his principles of being a good boxer and how the gang deals with that forms the ending of the film - surprises from the initial footage that opened the film.

Hugo Weaving impresses more with his singing than with creating a villain, Rose Byrne is simply beautiful in her ill-defined role, and Matthew Le Nevez, though forced to struggle through a weak script, makes an impressive screen presence. What is lacking from this visually stunning film is a sensible and credible story. The parts are much greater than the whole.

Grady Harp

This 1920s gangster thriller (admittedly a rare beast in Oz film) has a great cast, good production values, but a poor script.

Gang boss Hugo Weaving is over-nasty as pathological mob boss and Rose Byrne is attractive as his seductive but confused moll, but her character is also under-developed. The story revolves around aspiring boxer Matt Le Nevez whom Weaving manipulates for his own profit.

The film is melodramatic, as Weaving overdoes the nastiness, and violence, but the ending redeems the film somewhat. The production looks good, with nice period sets and costuming, and the film has a good noir-ish look.

The film contains some amusing 20s jazz crooner version of Cohen and Dylan songs.

The Tender Hook, or, Who Killed The Australian Film Industry? Case No. 278. This sorry excuse for a period drama takes a cast and idea with potential – Rose Byrne, Pia Miranda, Hugo Weaving, in a Jazz-era gangster drama – and turns it into a sloppily paced and executed soporific. McHeath (Weaving) is a boxing promoter and gangster and functioning illiterate; for no apparent reason he's given to singing Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen songs before bouts. How post-modern. How stupid. Anyway. There's a boxer, Art (Matthew Le Nevez), who becomes McHeath's latest protégé, over his unfortunately Aboriginal stablemate Alby (Luke Carroll).

McHeath's flapper moll Iris (Byrne) makes the goo-goo eyes at him. Sexual tension squelches under the surface. Miranda plays Daisy, a friend of Iris's (these flower girls stick together) who keeps turning up in scenes unannounced. They practice dancing together and talk about "hooking up" with guys. In the 1920s. I stopped counting anachronisms after that. There's a subplot involving Japanese beer and a backstory of Broome pearl fishermen. I don't know what it was all about. For some reason that is not exactly (at all) explained, Byrne puts cocaine in Art's lemonade. McHeath thinks he's a drunk and sacks him. Byrne plots and schemes to help him out again. She's a big one for the plotting and scheming. Most of which causes trouble. McHeath's two gunsels, portly Ronnie (John Batchelor) and Russian Donnie (Tyler Coppin), debate bumping off McHeath when he realises their part in one of Iris's schemes, but Ronnie wimps out when he sees McHeath crying. A lot of practically incoherent scenes get in the road of the film finally ending.

Director Jonathan Ogilvie spends a lot of time working with cinematographer Geoffrey Simpson creating some pretty images, but utterly fails to generate a sense of style, which might have compensated for and decorated the wispy, pathetically underpowered script; unfortunately Ogilvie's sense of film grammar, the lack of structuring of the scenes and exposition, is stunningly incompetent. In an early scene, Daisy suddenly appears in the car with the protagonists. How she got there, and indeed who she is, seems to have slipped Ogilvie's mind. There are many more examples of this sloppiness. Where he chases poetic sparseness, he achieves only wan irritation. He gains awkward performances from actors who are normally reliable, badly miscasting Weaving and leaning on Byrne's ability to project a kind of haunted doll-like humanity whilst saddling her with an incomprehensible character.

It might not matter so much if the story had more substantial characters and stronger plotting preferably not stolen from a dozen old noir films and festooned with witlessly sprinkled pop-culture quotes. But it doesn't. It's boring.

In the only act of commonsense they have ever made, the NSW Film & Television Office refused to fund this film. The Producers kicked up a big stink & in a blaze of publicity took their production to Victoria. Apart from the lost work for technicians, NSW were lucky not to have been involved...

The film fails on just about every level. The post modernism fails, the casting fails (what is Rose Byrne's character all about ? which 1 dimensional snarling nasty did Hugo Weaving channel ? what the hell is Pia Miranda's character doing?) and the story is a clichéd mess of contradictions. In fact, the story runs like a dragged out prelude rather than a complete plot line.

It might have had a chance if the "pop culture meets depression" style was better thought out and executed. If the casting was quirkier, if the style was less serious ... if just about everything was different.

Apart from the usual excellence in costume, design & cinematography (like most Australian films), the film is just a total miscue.

At a reported budget in excess of $7m, "The Tender Hook" is a symptom of the malaise of the Australian film industry - the wrong people and the wrong projects are getting funded. Compare this mess with "Noise" (under $2m), or "Cedar Boys" (under $1m) and you get the idea. The tough, interesting films are struggling for funding and the flabby, overblown projects with name casts are getting the bucks.

The funding bodies who invested in this deserve to go the same way as Hugo Weaving's character at the end of the film.

In 1920s' post war transitional period, a chauvinist gang in Australia institutes a wagering federation for middle-weight boxing championship. Beside with their drug and beer smuggling activities, they also rig walkover horse races. Hugo Weaving plays the chief of the gang and Rose Byrne does his fiancée.

My reason of seeing this film was because I follow Hugo Weaving's career since 1999's Matrix, and Rose Byrne's career since her appearance in Troy(2004). When the characters are all introduced to us, we found ourselves in the middle of crime chains. Absolutely, there is no mystery here, since we feel like we're part of the gang. Then the only lonely good guy of the movie came to the spot: Art Walker, a young and promising boxer. He defeats one of the former champions by the arbitration board decision. Resembling Scorsese's Raging Bull, the boxer is forced to throw the game. To get the title shot, he obeys to the chief. At the end, he has to make a choice between his honor and his goal to become a champion.

There are no outstanding performances from the actors, yet I liked the cinematography and art direction a lot. Originally written for the screen, the techniques used for passing from one scene to the next is so impressive. The editing has been dished out very expediently that holds viewers' attention continuously, even though the storyline is very simple and unassuming.

This one is originally a good sample of a crime/action genre. Not exactly a family movie for its scenes of drug usage and female nudity, but it's very entertaining for the purpose of watching with friends.