Adaptation or not, you have to present material to an audience that is palpable. The source material is really irrelevant.
The presentation, in both script and direction feels amateurish and cliché. The crime element has been done to death. The romantic angle is so poorly presented, especially the early montage, complete with cheesy music. The drone shots are overdone and the direction is stale overall. The only thing that saves this film is the obvious class of Hugo Weaving, though the film is not worthy of him. Megan Smart tries. Nice to John Brumpton here too.
Australian funding bodies seem to have no interest in bringing in an audience. They all want to create some cultural art that reaches no one, made by the middle to upper classes, telling working class stories. It's a joke. We need original stories that can also entertain. You can create cultural significant stories while embedding in well crafted entertainment, such as in Mystery Road or crime tales like The Boys and Animal Kingdom. Surely there are also other stories worth telling?
The Australian Film Industry seems to make films for itself, trying to 'educate' society from the outside, writing their scripts in Albert Park cafes, wanting to change the world with their colossal egos, thumbing their stuck-up noses at audiences. At least, that's what they're funding. Plenty of good scripts, no doubt, never see the light of day.
How much talent has Australia lost to overseas? Not just actors but writers, directors, producers, cinematographers, the works. We need to invest money in actual talent and foster them from the ground up and lop off the head of nepotism. Too many people have given up because they can't catch a break while 'important' crap like this keeps getting made. Decent Australian films seem so far and few between.
Maybe the concept sounded delicious over a second bottle of red and a seafood linguine in a South Melbourne restaurant but all they delivered was a dried-out cheeseburger.
