Movie Review Romper Stomper

Tweet

1992 - Spoiler alerts A controversial, taboo breaking and uncompromising violent movie looking at the behaviour of neo-Nazi far right extremists in Australia in the early 1990’s. Russell Crowe, in an early award winning role, is the brutal leader of a gang of thugs who teal, vandalize, and engage in running battles with Vietnamese migrant settlers in Australia. After an attack leads to a violent reprisal by a much bigger gang of Vietnamese men, the gang goes into hiding, but when his girlfriend, played by Jaqueline McKenzie, gets disillusioned and leaves, her boyfriend, Davey (Daniel Pollock), leaves with her. When a police raid leaves Hando (Russell Crowe) the only gang member uncaptured or killed, Hando tries desperately to reunite with the couple until he learns that Gabrielle (McKenzie) was the one who reported his whereabouts to the police, and tries to kill her. A relentlessly vicious film, that shows the horror of such gang mentality, but never really shows how anyone comes to join such a group. It has echoes of A Clockwork Orange too. This year, a TV sequel was launched, showing the way such groups operate 25 years on. Surviving cast members and characters, including McKenzie’s Gabrielle, appear. An important movie that never glamourizes its brutal unsettling realities. It also has a great soundtrack. Arthur Chappell