This
is Australia in the 1860s, not the American Old West, but you couldn’t tell the
difference from folks’ wardrobes. Plus, there is a gold rush on and the natives
are getting increasingly resentful (with reasonable justification). However,
Ben Hall was like the A-Team bushranger
(meaning outlaw). He fired off plenty of rounds, but never actually hit anyone.
The bushranger’s final months get the epic historical treatment (because the
end is always the best part of every outlaw’s story) in Matthew Holmes’ The Legend of Ben Hall (trailer here), which releases
today on DVD and VOD.
Hall
was like a nicer Ned Kelly, but with a longer career—or so he would have liked
to think. Generally, the citizenry of New South Wales understood he was an
average bloke forced into a life of banditry by circumstances and British
regulations. Unfortunately, his running-mate John Gilbert was not such a
naturally sympathetic figure. Their third gang-member, John Dunn is cut more
from Hall’s mold, but when he kills a constable out of stress and confusion, he
too threatens to undermine Hall’s image.
Hall
would like to cross over to Victoria and then immigrate to America, which he
assumes will be too preoccupied with the Civil War to mind his outlaw status
(as if we’ve ever checked on that kind of thing). That will be a trickier
business thanks to the passage of legislation declaring Hall an official outlaw
and fair game for anyone to take potshots at him, with no questions asked.
Legend starts off a bit
slow and bland, but steadily improves in both respects as it moves along. In
fact, it gets rather interesting when Hall starts to wonder if instead of Robin
Hoods, they are just a trio of thugs. They certainly commit acts that are well
past problematic, but it is also clear the frontier nature of NSW applies in
full force. Still, the two-hour-twenty-minute running time is way too long.
Jack
Martin also grows into the part of Hall is the film progresses. Initially, he
seems a rather brutish excuse for an antihero but he evolves into a
legitimately tragic hero, in the full literary, archetypal sense. William Lee
cuts a similar figure as Dunn, but with less rough edges. In contrast, Jamie
Coffa’s Gilbert makes us want to gun him down in the street like a rabid dog,
so you could say for his performance: it provokes strong reactions.
