The Rover

Eric, a morose, lethal loner, encounters three thugs in the Australian outback.  When the thugs crash their armored dune-buggy, they steal Eric's car, a modest-looking vehicle that would not look out of place on any suburban boulevard.  Eric discovers that the bad guys' vehicle is operable.  He gets the armored dune-buggy running and sets off in an obsessive pursuit of the criminal gang.  Along the way, Eric picks up the wounded younger brother of the leader of the gang.  After a shoot-out, the bad guys left him on the highway bleeding to death.  The younger brother, whose name is Rey, has one of those movie and TV injuries that, at first, seems horrific and life-threatening but can be ameliorated by being stitched-up, a surgical procedure undertaken by female veterinarian somewhere in the boondocks of New South Wales.  His belly sutured, and, therefore, fit for more violent action, Eric recruits Rey in the search for h is brother.  Eric and Rey continue their hunt for the bad guys, killing another dozen or so scavengers, bystanders, and predators in the wilderness before the final shoot-out.  Eric gets his car back; poor Rey is killed and the penultimate shot in the picture reveals why the hero was so obsessed about recovering his puny little vehicle and the precious cargo in its trunk.  An opening title announces that the action takes place in the Australian outback, "ten years after the collapse." 

If the plot of David Michod's The Rover (2013) seems familiar, that's because it is -- the movie is a reprise of themes developed in the first installment of the Mad Max series, the picture that introduced Mel Gibson to the world lo these 36 years ago.  The Rover is more single-minded, perhaps, and more nihilistic -- after all, a lot of desolate highway and road-kill has intervened between 1979 and 2013, including Cormac McCarthy's contribution to the well-worn genre with the novel The Road and its film version.  But there's nothing to the movie but picturesque desolation, a rogue's gallery of remarkable-looking character actors, most of whom sit around staring blankly into the distance, and two rebarbative performances by the movies' leading men.  Guy Pearce plays Eric and he broods sullenly between bursts of unexpected violence -- he's not a character but a teenage boy's fantasy.  (Michod gives him a tiny bit of backstory --it's nothing more than the snippets of exposition we get about Mad Max in the films featuring that character and just about what you would predict:  the poor fellow is a soldier half-crazed because he killed his unfaithful wife's lover and got away with it.)  Robert Pattinson plays the part of Rey; his performance is grotesque to the point of kitsch -- Pattinson's Rey is a man-child apparently from south Mississippi (how he got to the wilds of Australia is never explained) who seems to be retarded, talks in an incomprehensible slur of words and spends a lot of time twitching and gurning, baring his teeth in strange puppyish grins or cowering spasmodically.  The picture is crammed with shoot-outs and murders; there are a few picturesque car-wrecks and New South Wales looks like an even more desolate version of the gravely basin and range around Las Vegas.  I understand the movie is highly regarded "Down-under" and was nominated for many awards.  It's not really very good, although its entertaining enough in a morbid sort of way -- the movie is like a squalid low-budget version of Mad Max without any sense of humor and without George Miller's overwhelming visual imagination.