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Men In Black 3

It’s not a sequel that needed to be made, but thanks to the charm of its leads and a tone that harks back to the wit and humour of the original, it’s a pretty enjoyable trip.

Bel Ami

The excellent female support cast saves this patchy effort, which is let down by its leading man and a flat screenplay.

The Dictator

A disappointing, often repulsive and mean-spirited mess of a film with seemingly only one real criterion on its agenda: to shock and offend.

The Woman In Black

Packed with atmosphere, this old-fashioned but deftly told ghost story delivers ample chills and thrills.

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The Nothing Men (Film)

by Colin Fraser | August 09, 2010 15:06 | Edited August 11, 2010 14:48

While the actors deliver gut-wrenching performances, the film is let down by its self-conscious and stagey production.

The factory has closed. The boys have got nothing to do but sit around and stay out of trouble. Achieve that and they get a sizeable redundancy. The problem is, the boys are bored. They're on an emotional knife edge, but Jack Simpson (Colin Friels), the self appointed leader, knows how to keep them together, even Wesley (Martin Dingle-Wall), who prefers to read a book than play cards and talk tits. Then David Snedden (David Field) turns up. He wears a suit. He used to work at another factory where payouts were lost because someone ratted to the head office. Is David that man? Will they lose their redundancy? Not if they keep their cool, and not if the fiery Jack can keep it together.

 

With legendary Aussie thesps Colin Friels and David Field as Jack and David, respectively, you'd expect powerful things, and by and large, that's exactly what you get. Performance is everything, as the screws turn tightly and each man plays his hand. Every one of these fairly obnoxious characters has something to lose, and as revelations pile up, so does the emotional body count. Where it leads is as revelatory as it is gut-wrenching.

 

What undoes much of the great work is writer/director Mark Fitzpatrick's reluctance to take his film far beyond the proscenium arch. Everything about this production is self-conscious and stagey - pacing, angles, blocking. Even when events are taken outside the film's two main sets (the factory and Jack's lounge room), you can virtually hear the creak of backgrounds moving. That may be the point, but it's a peculiar decision, and proves to be an unsatisfactory one.

 

While The Nothing Men earns several stars for generating raw, distressing emotion, it loses just as many for its lack of cinematic courage.