MOVIE REVIEWS Plot goes missing
Star Eric Bana fails to save a lukewarm mystery filled with unlikeable characters
Released just over three years ago, The Dry arrived fully formed as one of the better crime-laced mysteries filmed around these here parts.
Based on a best-selling novel by Jane Harper, the movie fastidiously mined deep veins of mood, menace and misery from within a small, rural Australian community.
Local audiences quite rightly came out in droves to embrace the picture, which wound up grossing a stack at the box office.
However, it looks highly unlikely that the long-awaited sequel Force of Nature will be striking the same resounding chord with Australian viewers.
To be absolutely blunt, the new movie tumbles several notches downwards from the consistently high standards set by its predecessor.
The principal problem is the turgid, muddled mystery lodged in the nucleus of the screenplay.
In adapting another Harper book, writer-director Robert Connolly stacks his storytelling deck with characters whose only two defining traits are that they all have something to hide, and will inevitably get quite argumentative when prodded about what it is they might be concealing.
With so little scope for adequate character development – let alone the summoning of a single surprise twist – Force of Nature staggers about in a state of belligerent confusion.
There is plenty of stress and anxiety in the air, but little chance for an audience to truly make any sense of it.
Once again, our lead investigator in The Dry 2 is federal police officer Aaron Falk (Eric Bana). He has taken a curious interest in an ill-fated bushland hiking expedition which resulted in one member of a fivewoman group not returning to base.
The missing person in question, Alice (Anna Torv), just happened to be Falk’s prize asset in a corporate corruption case he is close to cracking.
While there is the possibility Alice may have met with foul play out in the scrub, there might also be a USB thumb drive out there somewhere that will expose some major conspiracy only Falk and his secondin-command (Jacqueline McKenzie) can see.
With so much second-rate material to slouch and grouch their way through, it is no small wonder that the cast can only supply performances that run the gamut from inane to insufferable.
Bana cops the worst of it in a role so blandly underwritten that you start wondering whether he is actually playing the same character from the original The Dry.
Torv’s Alice is so unlikeable that she invokes little to no sympathy as someone perhaps fighting for their life in wet and inhospitable terrain.
Even the likes of seasoned campaigners such as Deborra-Lee Furness and Richard Roxburgh have no choice but to serve up the same brand of antsy, unpleasant figure that almost everybody else on the cast list is playing.
Force of Nature: The Dry 2 is in cinemas now