The Man from Snowy River showed the world we could make Westerns as good as the Yanks; ditto Anzacs with war stories and Crocodile Dundee with fish out of water comedy, so you can't blame the Burrowes Film Group for having a crack at the buddy action film.
And you know something? There's no reason why we couldn't - it's just this isn't very good. For starters the plot is both thin and needlessly complicated. Jon Blake and Mark Hembrow are usually very likeable, and could have been here but don't really have characters to play - it didn't require anything of depth, just "larrikin" but they're not even that: Blake's dad had a sort of shady past but nothing much is made of it; they know Painters and Dockers and for some reason can handle guns (I can't remember an Aussie film which had so many guns).
Blake flirts with Nikki Coghill who again is very pretty, likeable and much too good for the film she's in - but there is no romance: its even more chaste than The Man from Snowy River which is saying something. There are some decent support actors such as Bill Kerr and Terence Donovan, a plot full of holes (people are constantly being kidnapped or popping up out of nowhere), unimpressive action sequences, broad caricatures instead of characterisation, lazy populism. It's just kind of stupid. I really wish the Burrowes Group had only made films based on strong source material - they could have lasted a lot longer.
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