I'd initially heard about The Emu War when seeing a post made by Aaron Gocs on Instagram, and the idea of seeing the fair dinkum Aussie comedian in a gonzo comedy about soldiers fighting bird puppets sounded like something with greens potential. For the sold out audience around me, it seemed that the film reached its potential as they all giggled away. But I sat at the back of the cinema waiting for the film to find a rhythm to its madness or a single joke that landed, and it never happened.
There is a point in the beginning exposition of The Emu War that might lead one to believe that we're in for an affectionate reimagining of The Dirty Dozen. Alas, the four (yes, only four) "elite" soldiers sent into enemy lines to tackle the emus head on are dropped into the film without giving the audience time to meet and get to know them. A number of haphazard flashback "gags" are jammed in there to give each of them a brief, unfunny backstory, but it rarely comes across as anything more than lazy. And that's because it is. The Emu War is, despite the best and sincere efforts of everyone involved, one of the most fundamentally lazily written films I've seen in a very long time.
The entirety of The Emu War is the same joke repeated again and again. It's not a particular joke; it had a different setup and punchline every time. But every single time, the gag is "let's tell an unintentionally unfunny gag which is so dumb and lowbrow that the audience will appreciate the irony". There is an etiquette to this kind of humour that The Emu War does not have a grasp on. The audience around me consistently erupted with laughter and had a great time, but
In The Greasy Strangler, the juvenile sense of humour was offset by the film's artistically woven assault on the concept of good taste. And in the notorious terrible but ironically enjoyable Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot, the general concept of a buddy pairing between Rambo and one of The Golden Girls against the backdrop of a police procedural is so ridiculously out of place that it hit an interesting note for me. The Emu War hit neither of these notes, largely because despite the sincere efforts of the filmmakers, it seems like an improv comedy group decided to frantically pull out the most juvenile gags they could and stuffed it onto the page. The last time I saw a movie try to wring out a feature length screenplay from this low a standard of writing, it was in a film called Disaster Movie. Being the disaster that it was I turned off that movie about 30 minutes in. I thought directors Aaron Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer had retired from filmmaking because nobody was interested in funding their juvenile, pottymouth and ridiculously lowbrow films anymore. But if they migrated to Australia, evidently Screen Australia would throw money around to see their kind of vision brought back to cinemas.
Of all the lowbrow misfired attempts at humour in the film, there was one in particular that took me off guard. It was a scene where the characters decide to have an impromptu orgy to... somehow escape from a prison, and the filmmakers have decided to actually blur out everyone's genital region. Surely there are a hundred other ways to choreograph and shoot a scene like this so that you don't have to resort to, you know, literally blurring a film to remove any slight facade of a fourth wall having ever existed. And yet just like every other point in the script, the creators took the lazy route.
The Emu War doesn't have a script. It doesn't have a story. And for the majority of the time, it doesn't have much in the way of production values either. It has and endless surplus of dialogue which the filmmakers seem to think are jokes, many of which are flashbacks seemingly designed to distract from the fact that the story is absent and bereft of movement. I could forgive this all if the movie was funny because it aspires to be a comedy more than anything, but minus two or three moments of Aaron Gocs' natural charismatic delivery, I couldn't find a single thing to write about. Maybe one day I'll see a film that knows how to better use his talents, but that day is not today.
To its credit, the visual effects in The Emu War are pretty decent. And the on-the-nose use of practical puppetry was one of the highlights for me, particularly in an era where people all too often over-rely on CGI. And the cast give it a very sincere effort, even if the material they're working with isn't pristine.
It's one thing to make a film, and it's another to sit in the audience and criticise it. But films typically have narrative, script and storytelling etiquette to go with them. Those are three things, among many, many others, which are completely absent from The Emu War. I haven't seen an Australian comedy so unfunny since The Very Excellent Mr Dundee, a movie I hold in so much contempt that I would call it the worst Australian film ever made. I don't have that same contempt for The Emu War because it's a silly little film made by a bunch of people who just wanted to have a good time, but I didn't have anything close to a good time watching it. And I just couldn't in good conscience summon the strength to recommend it to anybody. It was a harmless little Australian movie and I was surrounded by people who enjoyed it. Alas, when I exited the cinema and was asked what my thoughts were, all I could say was "Gallipoli was funnier".
