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Australia. A big budget movie with lots of adventurous potential. It could have been a spectacular flick, but instead it turned out to be extremely mediocre. Why?

First of all the story really isn't that interesting. There is nothing new about a group of rookie ranchers who have to drive their cattle from one point to another.

In the lead role we have Nicola Kidman who is a great actress. No doubt about it. But we have already seen her in this role as an aristocratic woman from England, who has to set foot in a rough western like world. We saw that in Far & Away.

Hugh Jackman is the other Australian star in a leading role. He is really squeezed into an extremely boring character named Drover. This guy can't settle anywhere because he has a past influenced by death, war and lost love. Just a few minutes and you know how he will react to everything in the rest of the movie. He is kinda like a horse-loving Han Solo lost in the Australian outskirts.

Those were the two main characters, and then we have a complete stereotype bad guy Neil Fletcher (David Wenham). This villain is so evil that he gladly will see his own son dead, and he will do anything to advance in social status. And the lust for revenge is more than ever filling this character.

The characters add absolutely nothing new to cinema. They are so boring, and I am surprised that no more depth has been added to them. Director and writer Baz Luhrmann tries to compensate for this by adding several subplots to the main plot. Baz Luhrmann tries to wrap it all in as a criticism of the racial divided Australia during the years the movie takes place, but it really just seems like a bad excuse. The movie fails completely to get under the skin of that black chapter in Australian history.

We instead end up with a big budget movie that could have taken half of the time without any problems. The result would not have been worse, and they could have saved several millions of dollars on the budget of CGI. And much of the CGI isn't impressive anyway. The background often looks like a computer game, and that is a shame when Australia has some of the most beautiful landscapes in the world.

My conclusion is that this movie has nothing new to offer, and I just don't care a bit about the characters because they are so damn boring.

Overall: 5/10

Steven Seagal is back as a dad who seeks revenge for his killed son. He wants justice to be done. It sounds like a new Death Wish movie supplied with some kung fu, and that is what it probably was supposed to be.

It could have been a decent movie, but it really fails in almost every aspect. The acting is as you could expect in a Steven Seagal movie, but the fight scenes are way below the quality in movies like the two Under Siege movies. It seems like that Steven Seagal is either too old or too unfit to perform action like in the old days. Instead he is always standing and just lifting a leg or punching. Therefore the fight scenes are also very short and cut in a quick way, so we do not see how old and slow the action star is today. We also have a car chase in the movie, but it is really not worth mentioning. The pursuit is slow, and at times you can see that the picture has been accelerated so it looks faster than it really is.

The story is also pretty simple and straight forward, but the script is not what you would consider Oscar material. It is of course not what you expect from a Seagal movie, but it could at least have been a bit better. Well, it is not.

There was a time where you could find something good in a Steven Seagal movie, but those days are over. Today his movies are just as bad as the worst from Van Damme and Chuck Norris. It is a shame, but maybe Lord Steven should consider retiring and instead focus on his music.

I remembered Django to be a pretty good movie, but it wasn't exactly as good as I remembered. Actually it's not anywhere near the work of Sergio Leone.

Instead the movie is pretty mediocre with some pretty big flaws. It takes place right after The American Civil War, where Django seems to be a ghost wandering around trying to cope with his past. He's carrying a mystical coffin, but we don't know what's in it.

He visits a town, where two clans are fighting each other just like in Kurosawa's Yojimbo and later Sergio Leone's A Fistful of Dollars. But the story never gets as exciting as in Leone's remake of the Japanese movie. The English dubbing is poor and it affects the intensity of conversations, and there is at least one major historical incorrectness. I might also add that we don't get music anywhere near Ennio Morricone's scores.

That said it's still worth watching. Sergio Corbucci has another approach to the western genre as Leone. Where Leone's westerns take place in the dry desert, Corbucci's world is muddy - and for some reason it's never really night.

Watch it to extend your knowledge of this great Italian genre of the 60's, but don't expect a Leone masterpiece.