Australian film sequels are rare, due to the sporadic nature of major commercial success stories with franchise potential and the modest infrastructure of the industry. George Miller rules this particular Thunderdome, having delivered five: The Road Warrior, Beyond Thunderdome, Babe: Pig in the City, Happy Feet 2, and Fury Road, each serving a very different dish to its predecessor. The Ozploitation era saw Alvin Purple, Fantasm, and Barry McKenzie sequels, while 80s hits The Man from Snowy River and Crocodile Dundee spawned three sequels—not to mention a television series and tiresome commercial—between them. The last decade produced sequels Wolf Creek 2, Red Dog: True Blue, Goldstone, A Few Less Men—an atrocious follow-up to a comedic gem—and the upcoming sequel to The Dry. Whilst sequels—even to films perceived as disappointments—are baked into Hollywood economics, and Australian directors have tackled sequels to their own or other directors’ franchises abroad—among them Richard Franklin (Psycho II, F/X2), Phillip Noyce (Patriot Games, Clear and Present Danger), Patrick Hughes (The Expendables 3, The Hitman’s Bodyguard’s Wife), Cate Shortland (Black Widow), and James Wan (too numerous to list)—it takes a truly anomalous Australian success story to trigger production on a sequel locally.
Wog
Boy 2: The Kings of Mykonos (2010), co-written by star Nick Giannopoulos and
Chris Anastassiades and directed by Peter Andrikidis, is a better film than
Giannopoulos’ previous venture, The Wannabes, and a better sequel than A Few
Less Men, but isn't as good as the original The Wog Boy or many of the other sequels
listed above. The film sends Steve (Giannopoulos) and pal Frank (Vince
Colosimo) from Melbourne to Mykonos after Steve inherits a beach from his
deceased uncle. However, he faces competition from islander Mihali (Alex
Dimitriades, Let’s Get Skase, playing dead straight), who has other ambitions
for the property. In transplanting the action from Australia to Greece and
highlighting tensions between Old and New World ways, the film attempts
something different to the entirely Melbourne-set original. The location shooting
adds production value, tapping into some of the same horny Greek travelogue
aesthetic as Shirley Valentine and the Mamma Mia films and giving Wog Boy 2
a more cinematic feel than the straightforward craft of its precursor. But the
film, simply put, is less funny. The comedy in the original was hit and miss,
with fish in a barrel satirical targets and excessive mugging (especially by
Lucy Bell), but enough of the jokes landed and the film had plenty of underdog
charm. The jokes are sparser and the quaintness is lost here.
Giannopoulos’ wrote, directed and starred in The Wannabes, making him an example of another rare phenomenon in Australian cinema: the actor-director. Here, Mad Max star Mel Gibson rules the Thunderdome, though most of his productions are international: The Man Without a Face, Braveheart, The Passion of the Christ, Apocalypto, and Hacksaw Ridge. Others include imports David Hemmings (The Survivor, Race for the Yankee Zephyr) and Rachel Ward (Beautiful Kate, Palm Beach); exports John Polson (Siam Sunset, Hide and Seek, Swimfan), Joel Edgerton (The Gift, Boy Erased), and Leigh Whannell (Upgrade, The Invisible Man); and Yahoo Serious (Young Einstein, Reckless Kelly, Mr Accident), Jeremy Sims (Last Train to Freo, Beneath Hill 60, Last Cab to Darwin, Rams), Rachel Griffith (Ride Like a Girl), Richard Roxburgh (Romulus, My Father), Eric Bana (Love the Beast), Angus Sampson (The Mule), Simon Baker (Breath), Damon Gameau (That Sugar Film), Anthony Hayes (Gold), and Russell Crowe, who directed Anzac drama The Water Diviner and Poker Face (2022).
Crowe stars as a tech billionaire, gambler, and art collector with a terminal illness, four character traits that immediately signal the film’s high-concept busyness. The film centres around a high-stakes, psychologically probing poker game with lifelong friends (Liam Hemsworth, Steve Bastoni, Aden Young, RZA) at his fancy property, while art thieves descend on the building. This 95-minute Stan Original bites off more than it can chew, but on the flip side I’m grateful for the brevity. It’s fascinating that Crowe’s two directorial works, made almost a decade apart, reflect the two distinct strains of his Hollywood star career: on the one hand, The Water Diviner is of a piece with his earnest period dramas with Ron Howard (A Beautiful Mind, Cinderella Man) and large-scale historical action-adventures with Ridley Scott and others, where Crowe essays heroic parts (Gladiator, Robin Hood, Master and Commander); on the other hand, Poker Face is of a piece with his schlockier, tonally wilder output of the past decade, such as RZA’s Man with the Iron Fists, fellow Stan original True History of the Kelly Gang, pandemic-era blockbuster Unhinged, and ropey blockbusters Man of Steel, The Mummy, and Thor: Love and Thunder. However, Poker Face takes itself too seriously, rather than embracing its goofy premise and tonal weirdness; there’s a playful mid-to-late 90s, post-Tarantino version of this story, but Crowe doesn’t deliver that, and the resulting film superficially skims its busy surface. To his credit, Crowe elucidates strong work from his co-stars, including former soap staples Daniel McPherson and Brooke Satchwell.
Television
director Daniel Nettheim has helmed twice as many episodes of K9 as he has
feature films (4 to 2), but the two films to his credit are keepers:
Angst, a product of its moment, and The Hunter (2011), a quiet, more classical
thriller. Willem Dafoe plays a hunter sent to Tasmania by weapons manufacturers
to hunt for the Tasmanian Tiger, considered by most to be extinct. There he befriends
the wife (Frances O Connor) and children of a missing man, and contends with
the attentions of environmentalists, loggers, other hunters, and a local with
opaque loyalties (Sam Neill). That description makes The Hunter sound almost
like a Van Damme or Seagal vehicle, but the film is a slow burn, with the most dramatic events occurring offscreen or via backstory. The result is
perhaps dramatically obscure, but very watchable. Like Wog Boy 2 the film milks
tangible production value from its setting—the lush Tasmanian forests—and
inserts into said setting one of the most consistently engaging and compelling
international imports to headline a local feature in Dafoe.
Ben