By The Butcher
You love ’em, he hates ’em! The Butcher carves up your favourite films, and this week, he applies his sharpened cleaver to one of the most beloved Aussie films of all time…Andrew Dominik’s crime biopic Chopper!
Oh, fuck…Uncle Chop Chop is back! The Butcher had hoped that with the passing of murdering, woman-bashing, crap-book-writing “folk hero” Mark Brandon “Chopper” Read that we’d seen the last of the shitty biopic based on his tawdry life…but no! Fucking Chopper is back in cinemas for its 25th anniversary!
Like that other singularly shithouse Aussie movie, Mad Max, the 2000 “smash hit” (well, in Australian terms anyway, which isn’t really saying much), Chopper, is a favourite with the kind of blokey young fellas who probably think that most movies are “for pussies.” On construction sites, in sporting change rooms, in barbershops, and out in the surf, you can probably hear guys ripping into their mates by saying, “He couldn’t knock the fluff off a cappuccino”, or affirming their own assumed tough guy status with lines like, “I’m just a bloody normal bloke…a normal bloke who likes a bit of torture.” It’s just bullshit blokes’ talk, but with a cinematic flavour…which doesn’t make it any more interesting.
Anyway, Chopper is just a dud flick. The flashy visual stylings instantly betray debut director, Andrew Dominik’s background in advertising and music videos, while his depiction of career criminal and author, Mark Brandon “Chopper” Read – basically a bullying standover man with a sense of humour – as some kind of haunted, tortured “urban poet” is borderline ridiculous.
And the performance of comedian turned actor, Eric Bana, doesn’t help either. On its much-ballyhooed release 25 years ago, over-excited critics called Eric Bana a “chameleon” and rhapsodised about his weight-loss-and-weight-gain routine (big deal; anyone can get their weight to yo-yo…just ask Oprah Winfrey!), but Bana’s mannered, obvious turn as Chopper is no better than his impersonations of Ray Martin (remember those?) on that horrible old comedy show Full Frontal.
Yes, Chopper is a typically crappy Aussie film, but what it’s inspired has been even worse. The aforementioned contributions to bloke-speak have been wholly irritating, as was the film’s installation of the late Chopper Read himself as a spoken word performer and media cause celebre. The film also gave rise to comedian, Heath Franklin, who has built his career on doing an impersonation of Eric Bana doing an impersonation of Chopper Read, which is just, well, fucked.
Want to read more from The Butcher? Check out his scratching of I’m Not There, his exploding of Interstellar, his take-down of Marvel Studios, and his carve-up of that other cinematic shit-show Citizen Kane.
