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Watched Red Hill, an Australian neo-Western made in 2010.
It was beautifully filmed but cliche-ridden. But I guess that was okay, because aside from a slow start, once the exposition was over, it moved quickly and onwards to its final conclusion.
Still, when your protagonist is an emasculated police officer who moved to the country at the bequest of his wife and you start up at your first day on the job missing your gun and showing up late, I'm thinking it's a big hole to dig out of.
When an escaped convict who is a half-burned Aborigine who is considered "the best tracker" of Red Hill and quite ruthless with a shotgun comes back to roost, you best believe blood will flow.
Still while I connected the dots rather quickly, I wasn't upset at the rather hasty journey. I could tell before some twists that perhaps the violence and ruthlessness was masked by something deeper.
You don't really get to know too many of the characters along the way, they merely propel the story forward. So there is no real sense of suspense when it comes to its midway point, you know the characters that are going to stick around and which ones won't be.
Yet, the ending did grip me with some emotion, perhaps that was the surprise, even if it was perhaps a play on that emotion.
Still a pretty brisk watch that was enjoyable to me.
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"General Woundwort's body was never found. It could be that he still lives his fierce life somewhere else, but from that day on, mother rabbits would tell their kittens that if they did not do as they were told, the General would get them. Such was Woundwort's monument, and perhaps it would not have displeased him." Watership Down, Richard Adams
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