So it seems I’ve become the Bloglin’s resident Australian film reviewer, despite the fact that I’ve never been to Australia. I think I may have some cousins there, so I guess that counts for something. Anyway, last week it was the superb Animal Kingdom, and this week I found Red Hill on my docket. I was pretty excited for this one as well. I saw that it had played at Fantastic Fest in Austin earlier this year, and I heard pretty good things.

It was being marketed as a really violent old fashioned western, and it starred Ryan Kwanten, who plays Jason Stackhouse on True Blood. That show is a little hit or miss for me, but I’ve actually found his performance to be one of the better and more consistent things throughout the show. He’s an Aussie, and it was interesting to see him act in his native tongue as it were, and also play a character who isn’t a total idiot. He’s actually pretty good. Too bad the rest of the movie is not.

Red Hill is a really frustrating movie to watch. Patrick Hughes, a first time feature filmmaker, takes on the role of director, producer, writer, and editor. He’s obviously a talented guy, but he definitely spread himself way too thin. The script and most of the direction here is top notch. Really, the entire movie is picturesque and beautiful, some shots are like bug-eye stunning.  The first five minutes of the movie are just silent shots of nature, and they were amazing. The whole movie looks like that part in No Country For Old Men where Josh Brolin is running from that car and the lightning storm is going on in the background.

But the script is just awful. Really, it’s not good at all. It’s so cliched and flat, I almost find it hard to believe it came from the same guy responsible for the rest of the film. I was hoping it was going to get better, or break any convention at all. It doesn’t. Kwanten plays Shane, a young cop from the big city who has to transfer out to  small farming town Red Hill because his wife is pregnant or whatever. I knew I was in trouble when he goes to his first day on the job and asks for the keys to his squad car, then all the other officers start laughing at him, then the next shot is him stumbling around on horseback. Duh Ryan Kwanten, these are country people, they don’t have cars! His boss is a gruff old man with a dark past named, seriously, Old Bill.

The movie concerns a convict who escapes from a nearby prison and wages war on the police force of Red Hill for mysterious reasons. It should be really taught and tense, and if you watched the movie on mute it probably would be. But instead it’s like, so boring. The killer, Jimmy (which is like the worst and least threatening name for a villain ever, especially since everyone in the movie says it about a hundred times) just basically goes from cop to cop, shooting them with little fanfare. It’s the same scene like ten times. Shane, for no apparent reason, decides he’s the only cop who can stop him, even though he doesn’t even like any of the other cops.

There was also a scene that was so absurdly tension killing I could not believe the editor kept it in the film, until I remembered Hughes was the editor too. In the middle of all this killing, Shane actually goes home to get his spare gun, and has a “funny” conversation with his wife about his first day on the job. Like “oh yeah, honey it was kind of tough, but nothing I can’t handle haha”. Keep in mind at this point he’s been shot and seen like 10 people get killed. I guess that’s really the root of the problem here. There is zero sense of danger in this movie. Hughes definitely has a future in filmmaking, if he just makes sure to let someone else write his movies. With Red Hill though, he’s got a small diamond covered in a big pile of coal.

- Whole Milk