True History of the Kelly Gang

2019, 1080hd

Johnny's comments:

True History Of The Kelly Gang is another biopic of famous outlaw Ned Kelly, this one based on the dramatised novel by Peter Carey where young Ned (Orlando Schwerdt) watches his mother Ellen (Essie Davis) service a local sergeant (Charlie Hunnam) as his useless father looks on, so that they can get by. One day, Ned kills a cow and steals some meat, which makes his father more useless but the sergeant catches up with him and pins the crime on his father despite Ned's protestations and sends him to jail. Ned saves the life of boy of privilege and the boy's mother (Claudia Karvan) attempts to convince Ned's mother that she can look after Ned but Irish Ellen despises the English and refuses to let Ned to go with her. Meanwhile, Harry Power (Russell Crowe) takes an interest in the family, particularly Ned and takes him under his wing, but Harry is a bad man, he murders a man right in front of Ned and then gets the sergeant on his side so that Ned can get revenge on him but Ned only wounds the sergeant and can't finish the job, so he ends up in juvenile detention.

Years later, Ned (George Mackay) is making his way back to his family, getting into bareknuckle fights for money, which catches the eye of Constable Fitzpatrick (Nicholas Hoult). Ned and his friend Joe Byrne (Sean Keenan) come to the Kelly farm and find his all siblings grown up and his mother the same old mess she always was, now shacked up with American crooner George King (Marlon Williams). Fitzpatrick takes an interest in Ned and introduces him to Mary Hearn (Thomasin McKenzie), whom he begins seeing. Before long the Kelly family would be back in trouble with the law when a family dinner with Fitzpatrick ends with Ned shooting Fitzpatrick in the hand and the Kelly boys and Joe on the run, while their mother is placed in a mental institution after her own tussle with Fitzpatrick. While on the run, Ned and his brothers kill a bunch of policemen and become are the most wanted in the state. Ned rustles up a group of locals to join him to take on the police. That ends with Ned gunning down Fitzpatrick. The police gather en masse and surround the Kelly Gang at the Glenrowan Inn, where they made their last stand.

I'm not gonna lie, I really don't care for the Ned Kelly story or its latest incarnation every twenty years or so and this movie is no exception. Most of the Kelly Gang story is myth now. This version from director Justin Kurzel (Snowtown) is grimy and filthy as hell, probably far truer in that way than previous versions and this is hardly surprising as Snowtown is one of the filthiest films I've ever seen, so they got the right man for the job. But as with Snowtown, there's no bite and the movie doesn't make the impact it should. The story is told in two parts, creating a fair bit of focus on Ned's barely talked about youth, which is fairly interesting, but the transition between the ages is clumsy and in what feels like a few days, Ned goes from being barely back in town to becoming the public enemy number one, with little motivation, and a lot brushed over and rewritten. There's a fairly decent cast of name actors but most of the big names have small roles with no real stand-outs although Essie Davis is quite good as Ned's mother and George Mackay (of 1917) as the older Ned is OK. But as I said, the Ned Kelly story bores me and this movie did nothing to change that.

Thomasin McKenzie film clip (collage below)

Essie Davis film clip (capture below)