Movie review – Animal Kingdom (2010) ***1/2

A lesson to emerging screenwriters – don’t always draw on your own experience, adapt something. If you can’t afford the rights to a book, try real life – in this case the Walsh St killings, which I admit to being unfamiliar with. But it provides a potent second act (and thus the third) for this crime saga.

There’s some excellent acting on display here – Jackie Weaver is superb as creepy mum, kissing her kids on the lips. Ben Mendelson is wonderful – I got the feeling Luke Ford, Guy Pearce and Sullivan Stapleton were Acting from time to time, but Ben M inhabits his part. He plays it like someone who really knows pain and darkness. The kid who played the teen was a debit – just a bland nothing. I know that was the point – there’s a lot of kids like out there, someone always seems to have a cousin like him – but making him the centre of the film sapped the movie of its energy. It’s hard to build a story around a bland, dull, passive protagonist. (It wouldn’t have been too hard to make him a bit more interesting.)

The low budget is well used and there’s a fabulous atmosphere throughout the film. It seemed to run out of puff around the witness protection program mark but there is so much other excellent stuff on display that you forgive it.