Australian thriller gets too lost in the bush

FORCE OF NATURE: THE DRY 2

Director: Robert Connolly Cast: Eric Bana, Anna Trov, DeborraLee Furness, Robin McLeavy, Sisi Stringer, Lucy Ansell, Jacqueline McKenzie, Jeremy Lindsay Taylor, Richard Roxburgh, Tony Briggs, Kenneth Radley

Rating: (M) ★★★

Working for the Australian Federal Police on financial misappropriation cases sounds pretty deskbound, but writer Jane Harper has managed to shoehorn main character Aaron Falk into three dramatic cases.

The first The Dry, where he returned to his hometown to get to the bottom of what really was behind a tragic murder/ suicide, was filmed with Eric Bana as the lead, and here in Force of Nature: The Dry 2 (Rialto and Reading) he gets tangled up in the case of a missing hiker because Alice (Anna Trov) was his asset in a case he is building against a boutique financial company.

Aaron received a panicked phone call from Alice saying she was lost and it was the last call her phone is recorded as making.

Alice was part of a company teambuilding exercise on a threeday hike in the Australian bush.

Five women went into the bush and three days later four stagger out covered with cuts and bruises and no Alice. And a storm is brewing, so they only have a short window to find her.

This is told in a series of increasingly annoying flashbacks as well as subplots that go nowhere — of Aaron losing his mother in the same bush range and a serial killer being on the loose in the area decades before.

The movie tries its best to be tensionfilled but never quite manages to spook you out with the mystery of the Australian bush. It is one of those goodbutnotgreat films that lingers in the mind for the loose threads rather than the performances, which are uniformly good.