Length: 1 hour, 34 minutes
Studio: First Look Pictures
Website: http://www.chopperthemovie.com/cover1.html
Release Date: 2001-05-25
Cast: Eric Bana, Simon Lyndon, Kenny Graham, Kate Beahan, Vince Colosimo
Director: Andrew Dominik
Screenwriter: Andrew Dominik (screenplay), Mark Brandon Read (book)
Music Score: Mick Harvey
WorkNameSort: Chopper
Our Rating: 2.50
For reasons unknown, highly literate auteurs (Quentin Tarantino, Oliver Stone, David Lynch, others) are repeatedly, redundantly, and ineluctably drawn to stylish tales of charismatic, violent white-trash hooligans who live only to screw, kill and quip. Add writer/director Andrew Dominik's "Chopper" to the sleaze-happy canon of Violent White Trash Cinema with its somewhat-based-on-fact tale of hyperviolent Aussie thug Mark "Chopper" Read (a Duracell-shaped Eric Bana), who ass-kicks his way from prison to vengeful crime sprees to media stardom as author of a best-selling autobiography.
("Oi kah'nt eeffen spell!" he brags.) On the plus side, "Chopper" offers an unusual trash milieu (downscale Sydney), some funny/gory set pieces (Dominik even trumps Tarantino in the ear-slicing department), and Bana's Down Under WWF charm. But its possible theme -- the eternal appeal of the quippy thug -- gets lost amid the graphic gut stabbings, wife punchings and general moral squalor, eventually devolving into pointless, sub-"Trainspotting" flash.
