Force of Nature: Oltre l'inganno

5 women embark on a company team building exercise, backpacking for 3 days into the forest. However only 4 return and a search is quickly launched for the 5th, Alice, played by the excellent Anna Torv. Enter detective Falk (Eric Bana) who needs to find Alice as she has been working undercover in the company for Falk in an attempt to expose fraud by bad guy Daniel Bailey (Richard Roxburgh).

Sequel to 'The Dry', which whilst not as good as the original is still an enjoyable watch. What director Robert Connolly does is to almost seamlessly intertwine Falk's investigation with flashbacks to what the group did. In most films this is done in large chunks, but here it moves more quickly, neatly shifting from one timeline to the other merging them into one. The 5 women make for a good team playing nicely off each other, mixing truth and lies to Falk and us, with Bana solid and sincere, thinking back to backpacking in his youth which lead to a tragedy and Roxburgh, ideal as the cocky slime ball. Worth catching.

I saw it by accident: its first week.

A noble idea got destroyed by poor scripting and politically-correct casting. Its big merit was the filming, Australian bush landscapes, but even those scenes had to be moody dull. There was far too much intertwining of timelines and unexplained lines. What body was found? Whose son found the body found by someone else. The lone wolf federal investigator was a Hollywood cliche, as were the classic eyeball confrontation scenes with the notional hero vs the police chief.

What stood out? Debra LF as Jill: an incongruous character in the plot, and with a mismatched husband, but still a great performance.

Do what I did: see it at a theatre which lets you brin in wine in a glass.

I rather liked The Dry, although I didn't rate it (or the book on which it was based) as much as most Australians, so I had quite high hopes for this one.

Alas, they were dashed almost as soon as the film began. The overblown, portentous music was set my Dud Alert quivering, and it was all downhill from there. Ridiculously over complicated plot with about four separate strand running at once, none of which were really resolved satisfactorily, and a couple of them not at all. I pitied the actors who had to deliver what must be some of the clunkiest lines of dialogue ever written, and perhaps the poor quality of the screenplay explains why the performances were so uniformly poor; even Eric Bana, who's an excellent actor, is terrible in this.

Just don't bother. There are far better ways to spend your time.

A sequel to 2021's sleeper hit The Dry, Force Of Nature: The Dry 2 once again follows brooding detective Aaron Falk where after his informant (Anna Torov) gets lost in the forest on a work retreat he joins a search and rescue team to help find her. Along the way he's forced to confront more of his childhood trauma.

Unfortunately the title for this movie sets the stage for what is a pretty convoluted and muddled movie and is overall a step down in my opinion compared to the first. There are three competing storylines here, the group of women, Aaron's trauma from his past and a serial killer subplot that literally goes nowhere. All of these storylines compete for attention but in the end they all end up falling flat. Also with the exception of Eric Bana as Falk almost every other character in this movie is unlikable (with maybe the only other exception being Mortal Kombat's Sisi Stringer.) With so much going on here it's surprising how unsatisfying and bland this movie was. Five stars for Bana though who is pretty much the only reason this might be worth your time.

Jane Harper wrote a third and final Aaron Falk book that was published last year so I feel like it's inevitable that it also gets adapted to make a trilogy out of this. Hopefully it's more in line with the first movie compared to this and it can finally give Bana's Aaron Falk some sense of happiness because the amount of past and present trauma he's endured throughout both Dry movies is kind of crazy.

Not as good as the first film ...I think , mainly because the missing lady , was annoying and unpleasant , just couldn't feel anything for her ... Otherwise , not bad ...Kind of satisfied the urge I have lately to return to the old fashioned style of cinematography , when films were more about character development and acting than special effects and non stop action . This film ,definitely , achieves that : there was almost no violence or fights or car chases, or , for that matter -casual nudity or sex . That's why for me it was a pleasant reminder of the days once and for all gone ... I mean , I love some crazy action , but sometimes just want to sit quietly and enjoy a bit of a cerebral thriller )