Red Hill

Red Hill is written and directed by Patrick Hughes. It stars Ryan Kwanten, Steve Bisley, Tom E. Lewis and Claire van der Boom. Music is by Dmitri Golovko and cinematography by Tim Hudson.

Young city cop Shane Cooper (Kwanten) gets a transfer to Red Hill, a place he hopes is a quiet enough town for himself and his pregnant wife to successfully raise a family. But his arrival at work coincides with the escape from prison of aborigine Jimmy Conway (Lewis), who is heading into town with revenge firmly on his mind.

Jimmy Conway has escaped and he's bringing hell into town.

Utterly splendid Neo-Western out of Australia. For his feature film debut, Patrick Hughes has crafted a loving homage to the Western genre whilst also imbuing his film with its own suspenseful blood. Blending Ozploitaton thriller values with Western genre staples of the past, Red Hill unspools on narrative terms as a gritty and rugged revenge piece.

Red Hill the town is fronted by gruff sheriff Old Bill (Bisley), he leads a pack of scuzzy characters who consider it their town and god help anyone who stands in their way. Into this maelstrom comes fresh faced Shane Cooper (yes the name is Alan Ladd and High Noon purposely spliced together), a genuine and honest copper harnessing a tragedy as well as a moral code that's not for shaking.

After quickly finding out that Old Bill is lacking in human graces, Shane finds himself coming face to face with Conway, who is all the horsemen of the apocalypse rolled into one. Face badly scarred and adorned with weapons and duster, Conway seems to have supernatural resources to go with his expert tracking skills and knowledge of the surrounding outback terrain (so think High Plains Drifter & Chato's Land then).

How come, though, that as he callously goes about killing off members of the scuzzy crew, each time he meets up with Shane, who is in full tilt survival mode, Conway refuses to kill Shane? And just what is that symbolic Panther doing stalking the edges of the landscape? One and the same, perhaps? It will of course all be revealed, and in truth it's no great surprise, the beauty is in how Hughes has toyed with our perceptions about Conway, this in turn makes for a cracker-jack finale.

Performances are superbly in tune with the material, Cooper, Lewis and Bisley really manage to steer their respective characters away from being histrionic or cartoonish. Musically it features stabs of delightful grungy rock blending in with Golovko's mournfully ironic score. The widescreen photography is most interesting, in that there's often smart shifting between a washed out palette to emphasise the remoteness of the setting, to opened up capturing of the beautiful vistas (filmed on location in Omeo, Victoria). The Blu-ray is a must for anyone interested in the film.

The sparse location is matched by sparse dialogue, there is no need for extraneous conversations or pointless filler, Hughes knows what he is doing. It's made with love and respect to one of the finest of film genres, and hooray to that! 8/10

RED HILL is a pretty decent Australian movie that will win no awards for originality but which tells its story in a straightforward and effective manner. I have to say that I do enjoy watching these Aussie outings as they're a breath of fresh air in comparison to more traditional Hollywood fare.

Fresh-faced Ryan Kwanten stars as a rookie cop posted to a rural town (yeah, how many times have we gone through that set-up before?) who soon finds himself having a very bad day when a criminal busts out of jail and comes gunning for revenge. The bad guy is a little better characterised than most, and I enjoyed the way that the lines between good and bad are increasingly blurred as the narrative goes on.

The main problem RED HILL has to face is its own predictability. The narrative is lean and spare, and it's all very familiar; we've seen such stories play out over and over again. Thus it must rely on style to win out over the less than sparkling substance, and it's only partially successful. The direction, acting and camera-work are all solid rather than spectacular. The film held me, but there's nothing much to remember about it afterwards.

There are a couple of times when there's what I judge an unnecessary jump in the plot line to accommodate something improbable in an otherwise realistic situation. They're minor flaws that actually brought a smile to my face rather than a groan, but they seem a little out of place even though this is an Australian film and they're famous for that kind of inclusion.

It didn't ruin my evening but it would have improved the film to have passed on them. This is an easily understood plot: a cop needs to get to a peaceful town in order that his wife can successfully carry their baby. Naturally, things go wrong his first day when a convicted murderer heads to the remote town to wreak havoc on his accusers. There little flashy gunplay or inspirational heroics, but the film will grow on you because it's very human and understandable.

All roles are artfully rendered by the cast and there's the constant feeling that you are there in a remote but beautiful area of Australia.

The plot was too cheesy and predictable.

The spaghetti western theme and lone wolf-bad guy story line could have been much more interesting.

There were so many people who could have easily taken the bad guy out, but didn't for various lame reasons.

There was one scene where the bad guy gets hit by a car, and doesn't even have a scratch on him. Then in the the same scene, some hapless victim unloads all of his bullets into the bad guy from about 8 feet - and MISSES!!!! C'mon now.

My wife and I gave the movie about 30 minutes and gave up.

It was too bad since we both enjoy Ryan Kwanten in True Blood.

For quite some time now, amongst the 1000's of movies I have watched, I noticed a certain ennui to my movie watching, as other people have said, this has been done before, most notably in American westerns. The wronged man comes back to reap his vengeance on the evil-doers. If this had been strictly formulaic and badly acted and filmed i would not have seen it all the way through to the ending. However, I was pleasantly entertained, I don't think it was too obvious a plot, it had me guessing for a while. The escaped convict looked suitably elemental and Ryan Kwanten as the young cop on his first bloody day in the outback played it well. Yes, there were some strange parts to the movie, although I just found the inclusion of the wild animal an amusing aside, and not to be taken too seriously. The score was good, the atmosphere was suitably bleak and a lot of it filmed at night to add to the tension. I think people expect too much these days, no this was not Unforgiven, but for a low budget movie out of Australia I thought this was a good remake of the classic revenge western. Certainly worth a viewing if you love westerns, or if you like revenge plots. For a Sunday afternoon, you could do a whole lot worse.