Transfusion. MA15+, 106 minutes. 3 stars
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It's good to see Sam Worthington out from behind the blue CGI of the new Avatar instalment in a movie much lower in budget and different in story and style. It's a dark combination of crime movie and family drama. While it has some cliches and flaws, there are things to like here, too.
Worthington plays Ryan Logan, a former Special Services sniper who served in Iraq. Now back in Australia, he is struggling on a number of fronts. He suffered physical and emotional damage while in the service and now, back in Australia, he struggles to control his temper and hold down a job. These problems are exacerbated by personal tragedy: his wife (Phoebe Tonkin) died several years earlier when the car she and their son Billy were in was hit by another.
The now-teenage Billy (Edward Carmody), obviously also troubled, is a handful: he skips days at his expensive school, runs away from home and has had brushes with the law multiple times. He's down to his last chance: one more time in court and he'll be taken from his father.
Having lost yet another job and behind in paying his son's school fees, Ryan is desperate for money. He reluctantly decides to take up the offer of his former military colleague Johnny (Matt Nable) to use his skills in some criminal activity in order to make some quick cash, But what's promised to be a simple job with no violence turns out to be anything but, of course.
And there's worse to come.
Besides playing the physically and psychologically scarred Johnny, Nable also wrote and directed the film. Although it's not his first screenplay this is his first time in the director's chair and it might have helped for him to have had a collaborator on the script and perhaps someone else directing so his focus was not divided (Johnny is a major character).
On the plus side, Nable draws good performances from the main actors - both Worthington and Carmody make their damaged and self-damaging characters sympathetic and real. And Nable himself is effective playing a man who's succumbed to the temptation of using his hard-won skills for bad purposes - though as is noted, life can be hard for ex-servicemen when what they're trained to do doesn't always translate easily to the civilian world. Nor do they always return well equipped to handle even mundane matters. It's a side theme that isn't laboured but gives the story some more depth.
The action sequences are also well done, suspenseful and skilfully handled, creating tension and suspense with some sharp moments of violence. And the jumping around in time, gradually revealing pieces of information to build up motivations and characters, is also handled quite adroitly.
On the negative side, the film often moves very slowly - while this is a brooding film with a grim atmosphere (underpinned by the cinematography and score), picking up the pace a little at times, and maybe trimming a bit off the running time, might have helped. Some elements, like the "ghost" appearances, feel either too long, too numerous or unnecessary. And some of the ideas are pretty familiar - the struggling single parent and kid, the feeling of being trapped into doing one more crime. Still, there are only so many tropes out there, and it's what you do with them that matters.
Paradoxically there are also things that could have been expanded upon - the relationship between father and son and the climax - with its ironic callback to a much earlier scene - is followed by a rather abrupt ending.
I saw this at Dendy in its cinema run before its Stan premiere on January 20.