Buy posters from this movie

Guy Pearce - with lanky hair, unkempt beard, jutting chin and stretched vowels - is Dale Twentyman, the eldest and most sensible of three criminal brothers. Mal is the middle sibling and, as played by Damien Richardson, he’s sweet natured but dim. Joel Edgerton, usually cast to add warmth to an ensemble, is terrific as the heavily muscled livewire Shane who can’t control his anger. Edgerton delivers on the comic promise he showed in Praise, a few years’ back. The brothers are from a family of butchers, and they occasionally revert to a coded abattoir slang of words spoken backwards. This is just one of Roberts’ unexpected touches - others include a drag detective and a dyslexic assassin.

Although the robber-brothers are stock types - Panic Room’s home invaders had the same personalities - Roberts plays with our expectations. His plot does not hinge on Shane losing his cool or Mal doing something stupid. It’s the rational Dale, the group’s nominal leader, who lands them in trouble.

Rounding out the characters is Dale’s femme fatale tramp of a wife, Carol (a delicious Rachel Griffiths). There’s a scene where she visits Dale in prison that will have you alternately squirming and laughing in disbelief. She’s sleeping with Frank (Robert Taylor), the corrupt lawyer who’s planned the latest, most ambitious robbery and intends sending the brothers back to prison when it’s over.

All the actors bring unexpected depths to characters that initially seem likely to remain caricatures. Except Taylor, whose one-dimensional lawyer seems to have walked off a daytime soap. I’m giving Taylor and Roberts the benefit of the doubt here - I suspect they wanted a completely unsympathetic character for the finale, which is an explosion of sub-Tarantino cartoon violence. The film has a heightened tone from the start, with a prison basketball match that turns almost comically nasty. In combination with the cranked-up performances, the tone of the film convinced me the violence wasn’t to be taken seriously.

The Hard Word, shot around Sydney and Melbourne, looks and sounds uniquely Australian. It’s about male mateship and, besides Griffiths, the function of the female characters is mostly to confirm the brothers’ heterosexuality. Which is a shame because I wanted more of Rhondda Findleton’s counsellor - she works a treat with Edgerton.

There’s a beautifully staged coda at an airport. It capped the rush of goodwill I felt for these characters and left me wanting to applaud.

link directly to this review at https://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=5938&reviewer=104
originally posted: 05/29/02 20:09:55
 printer-friendly format