TRUE HISTORY OF THE KELLY GANG (2020) FILM REVIEW

*****

18, 125 Mins

Antihero origins story discomforts and dazzles together.

At the beginning of 'Goodfellas' (1990), Ray Liotta's Henry Hill mutters the immortal line "all my life all I wanted was to be a gangster". In 'True History of the Kelly Gang' (2020), you could almost imagine George McKay's Ned Kelly subverting that Freudian quote with "all my life I wanted to be an outlaw". This movie is - like 'Goodfellas' - very much the story of a hot-headed young man burning with toxic masculine rage and baffling ambitions for a lifestyle of glamourized crime. It's also the only movie where Martin Scorsese, Batman and Spaghetti Westerns can be mentioned in the same sentence!

While not particularly well-known on British shores, Ned Kelly remains one of Australia's most famous figures. To the authorities, he was an outlaw, a bushranger, a gang leader and convicted police murderer. To the masses, however, he could be seen as the country's Che Guevara or Jesse James. A hero who waged war against British colonial rule. He's someone with an icy influence on cinema as a whole - the world's first dramatic feature film was, of course, 'The Story of Ned Kelly' (1906). Since then, there have been nine big screen renditions of the man's story. The most famous include 1951's 'The Glenrowan Affair' where Australian rules footballer Bob Chitty played the morally ambiguous outlaw. Mick Jagger even starred as him in Tony Richardson's 'Ned Kelly' (1970) which was not the best received version. All before the late Heath Ledger in the 2003 film of the same name.

Australian film-maker Justin Kurzel frankly couldn't be a better fit to cut to the dark, bloody heart of the Kelly backstory. 'True History of the Kelly Gang' is adapted from Peter Carey's Man Brooker prize-winning novel, but Kurzel is the real auteur here. His 'Snowtown' (2011) - a ruthlessly rough retelling of the Snowtown murders - was one of the best films of 2011. I also absolutely loved the director's bloodthirsty spin on 'Macbeth' (2015) which still stands as one of the strongest Shakespeare adaptations. More recently Kurzel turned his hand to 'Assassin's Creed' (2017) - a shot at breaking into the mainstream. That wasn't bad at all. If anything, it was one of the better video-game movies, but was panned by critics and proved a massive Box Office flop.

Now 'True History of the Kelly Gang' sees Kurzel revelling in his passion for the sweary, salacious and savage. Both his most accessible and finest film to date, the key to its appeal is the mixture of populism and psychology. First and foremost, this is a Western drooling with the energy, elegy and elan of Sergio Leone's 'Dollars Trilogy' (1964-1966). Something which will immediately draw in an older audience brought up on these classics as strapping Saturday matinee entertainments.

It has all the big, blastin' Wild West tropes - PING! PAM! POW! shootouts, galloping horses, handguns strapped to the belts and gold-toothed men in cowboy hats grumbling "AHHH!". Served alongside these generic stereotypes is slicin' violence to have you squirming baloney. Take the 18 certificate seriously because one moment had me going "oooooh", "arrrrrgh" and "isssssh" like an overprotective parent when one character bites off another's ear. 

This is some of the nastiest on-screen guts, gore and grue I've seen in years. However none of it is ever sensationalistic or stylized in the manner of Quentin Tarantino or Robert Rodriguez. The camera strives to recreate the tooth n' claw trimmings of 19th century Australia with harrowing visual reminders that this is a world where women were raped, ethnic aboriginals slaughtered and Irish beaten to the pulp as convicts. The movie's also not shy of its own savagery. Particular gross-out highlights include a zoom-in on a cow's chopped-off leg. With raw flesh and blood rarely looking so unapatising, such a snippet will truly make meat-eaters want to go vegan!

You'll equally find yourself going "CRIKEY! THAT'S GOTTA HURT!" whenever someone (and by someone I mean almost everyone!) gets blasted to smithereens and all these atrocities take place against the most alien and outlandish of landscapes akin to the Martian rouges of 70s Sci-Fi productions. There's panoramic sweeps here comparible with Kubrick with the cinematography vast and sprawling, but also minimalist and minute. For example, you'll get a landscape shot of the Outback complimented by a Malickian close-up of a cactus swishing and swashing in the wind. 

Needless to say, 'True History of the Kelly Gang' is beautiful, but bloody and brooding in its aesthetic. The scorchin' hot Western sun is what will innevitably bring in the crowds because there's always a market for cowboy action, but what's most interesting is the psychoanalytical stuff. Beneath the pulp of the film's violence and shootouts, this is a razor-sharp character study of a young man shaped by the obscenities of his upbringing. Where previous depictions of Ned Kelly have faltered in their attempts to glorify him as some sort of Australian Robin Hood hero, this taps into the propensity for nastiness that made him tick.

​A scene early on will have you watching through your fingers when the young Kelly (a terrific child performance from Orlando Schwerdt), first of all, shoots Charlie Hunnam's brutish constable in the leg before being forced to put a pistol to Russell Crowe's head. Crowe is better than he's been in ages as Harry Power - a beefy, intimedating bushranger who took the young Kelly in as his teenage accomplice. Throughout this segment, I genuinely believed the young boy might pull the trigger. A harrowing encapsulation of a youngster's early exposure to violence that really drives the central character's descent into criminality.

It's also the kind of childhood trauma that would push anyone over the edge. And here was where I saw shades of Christopher Nolan's 'Batman Begins' (2005). The same suggestion that childhood trauma is the tipping point for a youngster's transformation from scared, innocent child into vicious vigilante exists in this movie. In fact, the whole film could be read as a superhero or, should I say, antihero origins story. By the end of it, Kelly has almost gone through a personality switch and become a twisted symbol for blurred morality.

You're never sure whether you should love or loathe Ned Kelly. Say what you want about British Colonial rule, the majority of atrocities carried out by the Kelly gang - robbing from civilians and killing police - were morally reprehensible. Not only does this film have moral grey areas wide enough to fill an entire season of 'Game of Thrones' (2011-2019), but, at its heart, is one simple idea.

Not in a long, long time has one idea run so firmly and fluidly through the core of a motion picture. It's a kind of "mommy dearest" thread of a matriarchal figure and her protege. In this case, it exists between Ned Kelly and his mother Ellen (Essie Davis). She's his rock. She's the reason he pursues the life of a bushranger and is taken in by Harry Power. In any other hands, such a relationship should suck sentimental. In Kurzel's bruised palms, though, this partnership is every inch twisted and oedipal; prodding the knife into the heart-strings that should be being tickled with the suggestion that, for all Kelly's swaggering macho glaze, he was also essentially a big ole' mommy's boy.

In these two roles, George McKay and Essie Davis play this chemistry sublimely. The former remains such a riveting screen presence by virtue of having the scariest eyes ever - all bouncy, buoyant pupils that simply scream unhinged and maddening. He's absolutely brilliant as Mr. Kelly; getting deep beneath the skin of the falsely idolized renegade and letting audiences understand that he wasn't such a great hero after all. However he's not the star of the movie. That honour lies with Davis who is dynamite as Ellen Kelly. The momsy vital organ of the piece that delivers the killer blow to our antihero's fragmented psyche.

'True History of the Kelly Gang' is a film with bang for your buck blasted out of a shotgun by its Spaghetti Western pretences. A film with stomach-churning violence entirely necessary to capture the extremities of the era. It has - pardoning the pun - beef to level out the bang in the titular antihero's childhood traumas. And, at the centre of it all, you have the strangest, most disturbing "mama's boy" double-act which encapsulates the movie's throbbing arteries.

All this builds to a spectacular finale with the Kelly gang trapped and surrounded in a barn by Ku Klux Klan-like, white gown-wearing officers that actually evoked 'Straw Dogs' (1971). It's amazing how many movies recently have drawn upon Sam Peckinpah's "Wild Bunch in Cornwall" shocker for their third act. Think of 'Birds of Prey' (2020) earlier this month which put a carnivalesque, funhouse spin on the concept of home-made, DIY defences. 'True History of the Kelly Gang' has this and so much more. I loved it.
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