Random Movie: Wolf Creek (2005)

I have found that the opening crawl of a film saying "Based on True Events" means not only will the story be 90% fiction with a smidgen of reality but it will not be good. You might notice I did not file Wolf Creek under horror. While this is the common genre the film is placed in, I feel it is more of a dramatic thriller ala Breakdown or Vanishing. While there may have been some horrific moments in this film, it is not horror in my estimation.

Set in 1999 Australia, Wolf Creek follows three backpacking kids as they make their way through the heart of desolation. Our trio, played by Nathan Phillips, Kestie Morassi, and Cassandra Magrath, set off to Wolf Creek, the site of a meteor crash. After their hike, they fall victim to the old plot trick, the non-working car. Seemingly a nice stranger comes along with the offer to help them fix the car and get back on the road. Sadly, the kind stranger is not as benevolent as he seems. Needless to say, this is forty minutes in and I have spaced off already.

If there is one good thing to say about the movie, it is shot beautifully. The openness of the Australian landscape is very nicely captured from the sunrises to the roaming wild animals and even a flock (or whatever) of kangaroos. Perhaps there was an attempt to contrast the beauty of the wild to the savageness of man but I could have missed that. My main issue with the movie was that it took so long to get to anything worthwhile. Now, I have no problem with a movie that takes the slow-burn approach to ratchet up to something worthwhile. The problem was, the script was so predictable that anyone could see where it was going (especially as you expect to see a villain somewhere within the back half of the movie).

John Jarratt's antagonist is one of the better portions of the movie. One minute, he's spouting off cliched lines* and the next he has a girl chained up to do whatever with her. This is a man who lives in the wild, does what he wants, and never gets caught as he appears on the surface to be just another Aussie with an odd sense of humor. When the shit hits the fan, he is downright nasty in his deeds but remarkably sloppy for someone who from the newspaper clippings appears to have done this a lot. One of the three kids is dispatched quite nicely, one is merely shot to death, and the third escapes and lives to see another day. What kind of intelligent serial killer is this?

If the final forty minutes of this movie were isolated, expanded a bit, and given a different ending, this could have been a fairly decent movie. But as the fifty minutes leading up to that were so bloody boring, even some of the more graphic scenes later were diluted resulting in a movie that feels like a stranded/Saw wannabe with no clear direction. But at least the outback was nice.

*I propose a boycott of the phrase "If I tell you, then I'd have to kill you."