I saw the first 30 minutes of Justin Kurzel’s “The True History of the Kelly Gang” at last September’s Toronto International Film Festival — I was tired, it was a long day, I wasn’t feeling it and thus decided I would eventually give it another shot when it would be in theaters. Now, with the COVID-19 pandemic raging on, the film is being released via video-on-demand platforms. Having finally seen the whole thing, I can safely say that Kurzel’s film, recounting the life of Ned Kelly, is a wildly ambitious mess.
Kelly was Australia’s equivalent to Billy the Kid, a man with enough folklore surrounding him to fill up an entire museum. The fearsome legend he built up is no doubt a story that should be told on-screen, what with its tales of robbery, murder, and revenge, but two cinematic adaptations have already been filmed about the Aussie outlaw (Mick Jagger played Kelly in a very bad 1970 version and Heath Ledger in an equally horrendous 2003 movie).
Kurzel’s film is all set-up and barely any delivery. We see Kelly, the eldest son of a drunken immigrant father (Ben Corbett) and outlaw mother (Essie Davis), as a child (Orlando Schwerdt) being taken in by outback criminal Harry Power (Russell Crowe in a small role). Power turns Kelly into the bushranging homicidal rebel that would go on to define an entire nation. Adult Kelly (George MacKay) ends up forming a gang with younger brother Dan (Earl Cave), and two friends, Steve Hart (Louis Hewison) and Joe Byrne (Sean Keenan) and that’s when the film gets kicked up a notch.
Ned’s gang starts to spar with nemesis Colonel Fitzpatrick (Nicholas Hoult), a police constable/bi-curious sadist who brings high energy to Kurzel’s frames. The action scenes, lusciously shot with Ari Wegner’s photography, have Ned descending into maniacal madness. The climactic battle at Glenrowan, a gunfight at the O.K. Corral between the Kelly gang and hundreds of lawmen, is the piece-de-resistance, an almost surreal play on light, sound, and furor that hints at the better movie that was hidden underneath Kelly Gang’s 134-minute runtime. It’s really too bad that the overall structure of the film, a splattering montage of moments rather than coherent narrative, becomes the film’s disseminating flaw. There’s a lot to admire in “The True History of the Kelly Gang,” but rarely anything to take home. [C+]