The Tender Hook

My friends and I have just finished seeing a preview of this new Australian film. Everyone who was in the cinema agreed, what was the point of this film? There was no good story to follow, the characters were undeveloped, and the plot seemed unmotivated. I find it bizarre that this film, that probably cost in the high millions, got funded and made. It serves no purpose to the drama community, its adds nothing to the palette of Australian cinema. It really was a waste of time creating this droll unemotional piece of work and more time really should be spent work-shopping scripts and creating good stories, not creating a mess like this. Hugo Weaving and Rose Byrne were OK but severely hampered by a bad script. Pia Miranda's character was unnecessary and abstract from the plot, and her lines were average at best. A true waste of talent. The saving grace was Geoffrey Simpson ACS' cinematography, which like most Aussie films, was superb.

Come on guys, think about it next time please.

4/10

I was swept away with the look and feel of this film. It reminds me of those glam film noir films - a mix of romance and violence. Rose Byrne is so gorgeous. The beautiful 20s costumes and look really suit her. Whoever did the costumes should be congratulated. Her scenes with that young Aussie guy are HOT. Hugo Weaving is great as always - his controlled violence is scary. Like good film noir you have to pay attention to the plot, but I didn't have a problem. And I really liked the music -a mix of jazzy numbers by Chris Abrahams and some modern songs. I hope they put out a soundtrack. The whole film was an interesting mix of period film with some modern touches - like the music.

THE BOXER AND THE BOMBSHELL (AKA TENDER HOOK) is a strange little film from Australia by writer/director Jonathan Ogilvie. Strange, because it has so many fine attributes - cinematography, use of enhancing black and white period film into semi-colored film to bridge the gap between centuries, some very fine imagery, and a cast of strong actors. Everything seems to be in place for this film, including the manner in which the film begins - giving the audience an insight as to where the coming story will take us - except that Ogilvie fails to create memorable characters about whom we care. In many ways this is like a vaudeville show with many disconnected acts that move past our eyes so quickly that each is easily forgotten. The movie tries very hard to be unique, but it only succeeds in being a transiently memorable recreation of Australia in the mob controlled 1920s.

Following WW I and in the wake of the tragedies suffered, a gang headed by boss McHeath (Hugo Weaving) is in the boxing scam, horse race fixing, and the drug and booze market. A Japanese beer maker Hackett (Kuni Hashimoto) imports beer for the black market and falls out of favor with McHeath. McHeath's two main men - Donnie (Tyler Coppin) and Ronnie (John Batchelor) obey McHeath's orders but have their own agendas. McHeath keeps a moll named Iris (Rose Byrne) who cheers McHeath on while snorting cocaine. This little uninteresting way of life finally comes alive with the entry of young promising boxer Art Walker (Matthew Le Nevez - an interesting and talented new face) who cares for his older brother who suffers form the stress of having served in the Great War. McHeath has a boxer he is training to fix matches, Alby (Luke Carroll), and McHeath brings on Art to be his sparing partner. At the first fight the public deride Alby because of his race and Alby is dismissed leaving Art to take focus. Iris is attracted to Art but also feels tied to McHeath: to get Art out of the picture Iris slips cocaine into Art's lemonade before a fight and Art of course loses the important fight. From there it is a competition among all the cast - McHeath wants control and attention (he sings songs in the ring before the fights! and controls the people around him by terror and murder. How Art manages to cope with being a fight fixer versus keeping with his principles of being a good boxer and how the gang deals with that forms the ending of the film - surprises from the initial footage that opened the film.

Hugo Weaving impresses more with his singing than with creating a villain, Rose Byrne is simply beautiful in her ill-defined role, and Matthew Le Nevez, though forced to struggle through a weak script, makes an impressive screen presence. What is lacking from this visually stunning film is a sensible and credible story. The parts are much greater than the whole.

Grady Harp

The Tender Hook, or, Who Killed The Australian Film Industry? Case No. 278. This sorry excuse for a period drama takes a cast and idea with potential – Rose Byrne, Pia Miranda, Hugo Weaving, in a Jazz-era gangster drama – and turns it into a sloppily paced and executed soporific. McHeath (Weaving) is a boxing promoter and gangster and functioning illiterate; for no apparent reason he's given to singing Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen songs before bouts. How post-modern. How stupid. Anyway. There's a boxer, Art (Matthew Le Nevez), who becomes McHeath's latest protégé, over his unfortunately Aboriginal stablemate Alby (Luke Carroll).

McHeath's flapper moll Iris (Byrne) makes the goo-goo eyes at him. Sexual tension squelches under the surface. Miranda plays Daisy, a friend of Iris's (these flower girls stick together) who keeps turning up in scenes unannounced. They practice dancing together and talk about "hooking up" with guys. In the 1920s. I stopped counting anachronisms after that. There's a subplot involving Japanese beer and a backstory of Broome pearl fishermen. I don't know what it was all about. For some reason that is not exactly (at all) explained, Byrne puts cocaine in Art's lemonade. McHeath thinks he's a drunk and sacks him. Byrne plots and schemes to help him out again. She's a big one for the plotting and scheming. Most of which causes trouble. McHeath's two gunsels, portly Ronnie (John Batchelor) and Russian Donnie (Tyler Coppin), debate bumping off McHeath when he realises their part in one of Iris's schemes, but Ronnie wimps out when he sees McHeath crying. A lot of practically incoherent scenes get in the road of the film finally ending.

Director Jonathan Ogilvie spends a lot of time working with cinematographer Geoffrey Simpson creating some pretty images, but utterly fails to generate a sense of style, which might have compensated for and decorated the wispy, pathetically underpowered script; unfortunately Ogilvie's sense of film grammar, the lack of structuring of the scenes and exposition, is stunningly incompetent. In an early scene, Daisy suddenly appears in the car with the protagonists. How she got there, and indeed who she is, seems to have slipped Ogilvie's mind. There are many more examples of this sloppiness. Where he chases poetic sparseness, he achieves only wan irritation. He gains awkward performances from actors who are normally reliable, badly miscasting Weaving and leaning on Byrne's ability to project a kind of haunted doll-like humanity whilst saddling her with an incomprehensible character.

It might not matter so much if the story had more substantial characters and stronger plotting preferably not stolen from a dozen old noir films and festooned with witlessly sprinkled pop-culture quotes. But it doesn't. It's boring.

Ogilvie's big movie shows his exceptional craft in film making. The visuals alone are stunning, combined with top end editing, sets, and sound. The support players were almost better than the stars. the movie is flawed in other areas, a couple of slightly off performances noticeably from Hugo Weaving (what accent was he going for?) and Nevez (unconvinced of why we should care about him), and the story was so low key "small time crooks" that maybe the production values were just too good for it. Weaving was a little unconvincing as a tough guy although he could easily pull off scary. The violent scenes conflicted with him being a reasonably nice guy to his gf and taking sh!t from his underlings.

It's hard to know exactly why it didn't blow minds, but it certainly didn't blow. Some great lines and ideas going down in the script. Ogilvie shows class and control, craft and art, and I'd like to see where he goes next. Most definitely an art film rather than a big budget affair but with the look and feel it alludes to much more.