Expired

This movie is not really worth spending time to review but I will in a few brief words anyway. The pace is terrible. The plot and scenes are completely disjointed. You are left trying to figure out what the hell is happening for close to 3/4 of the movie. Half the movie has voice-over from the characters that means nothing because you don't know what's going on to begin with. The story itself what actually interesting and could have been something with different direction and editing.

This film tries to be deep and meaningful with a distinct Blade Runner skyline interspersed with real, busy street scenes. It just fails to ignite, the story isn't clear, Weaving is under used and the male lead has to be the most scruffy, miserable SOB i've ever come across.

His mumbling frustrates as do the extended scenes where nothing happens, without even minimal (poor) dialogue to break it up.

The girl has the sort of face that'll get work and , no doubt she can act.

Hugo was doing his bit for Oz, that's fair enough, the other two leads need to dust themselves off and try again.

The pacing is excruciatingly slow. The movie has very little dialog, plot or action. Kwanten talks in a half whisper both in his voice-over and dialog. It's really quite a boring movie. It shares a lot of characteristics with Lost in Translation.

My verdict - pass

If you decide to watch it and you happen to play it on VLC video player on Windows then run it at 108% speed.

It's an ambitious task producing a science fiction movie on an obviously low budget, especially if the content focuses on condition rather than plot.

The movie's cinematography is well worth watching, also editing is well made, but without a straight plot, scripting has to carry a heavy load because every scene has to stand for itself. Unfortunately, it doesn't hold up to the task. Though the dialogues seek philosophical depth, they lack refinement, constantly throwing me out of the suspension of disbelief.

Acting is just fine, including that of Ryan Kwanten who plays the lead role of Jack. However, his sloppy diction is hard to take. Eager to be as authentic as possible, he sacrifices his control over speech which makes him simply hard to understand.

Also, there are too many references to "Blade Runner": A lonesome killer seeking love, voiceover narration, androids, the lifespan issue, an Asian future city, even the soundtrack that sounds like Vangelis at times - there are just too many parallels.

Great Hong Kong footage, good editing, but overall an overambitious undertaking.

I rarely write review for films but, as an Australian filmmaker, I had to. Someone has to be honest and call it out when one of our Australian films, for a lack of better word, sucks.

In summary, it was bad. It gave nothing for the audience to hang onto, maybe except for some mediocre low budget VFX visuals. So with the slow pace and nothing to go for, it was excruciating to sit through the film keeping an open mind that it might get better, which it didn't. I was cringing as they whisper talked to each-other through the whole film, as if that would give their dialogue more depth. But there was not depth in the content of the dialogue.

While in Australia it is celebrated as another great work of Ivan Sen (actually he is a very good filmmaker), there are many flaws that should have been seen even in the screenplay, especially by those who gave the funding and support to the film. The biggest flaw was; why would the audience care for Jack? He is loser, not relatable, and he kills random people for a living, and he's not very good at it either. I could care less if he died from his condition (whatever his condition was).

I could go on and on, but I want to wrap it up with one question; 'Why does this movie need to exist?'. And the answer is it doesn't.

With all that negative, I know the director is fund of sci-fi genre, so I hope this was a great practice so his next sci-fi film will not suffer the same flaws.