Criminal Ways

Clever scripting, well crafted characters, side splitting humour & wonderful acting....you will find ABSOLUTELY NONE of those qualities within the pathetic & smutty film "THE WANNABES" !!

After the local success of his last film, "THE WOG BOY", comedian (?)Nick Giannopoulos has fallen into the trap of thinking his audience would swallow anything he made, and this poorly executed & terribly acted attempt at comedy is full of immature toilet humour and lame jokes that make you grit your teeth in pain.

The turgid script concerns a bunch of low brow criminals who enlist the aid of a third rate actor to create a Wiggles / Teletubbies type childrens act as a cover for a series of heists. The film just lurches from one painful scene to another as it sinks to the depths of boredom & stupidity, and I can see this film destined to end up in two places...(a) On the IMDB Bottom 100 film listing, and (b), In the $1.00 a week dump bin at your local video library.

Steer well clear of this giant lemon !!

I loved Wogboy, Nick Giannopoulos' earlier hit. The Wannabes was a major disappointment to me. Wogboy came from where the writer understood and has successfully used this genre over the past 15 or so years on stage and TV.

The Wannabes starts of with some badly drawn characters "the world's worst actor", cardboard cutout crims and the obvious bad girl with the heart of gold for love interest. Needless to say, everything else follows the formula.

Many ideas should and would have been discarded with re-writes, the "Flashdance" reference is one and their big break where they are "discovered" just left me confused for the mess that was on the screen.

Don't take the kids as it's language content is definitely not for the kids but can adults sit through guys doing a bad Hi-5 imitation without the cute girls to look at?

Hi! someone said non-australians wouldn't probably like it. maybe i have spent enough time in Australia but my boyfriend and I saw it up in Darwin and it was his first time in Australia. while it was not high brow intellectual humor, I thought it was hilarious and my boyfriend had a few chuckles as well. I thought it was silly and funny how it made fun of how a lot of kids stuff is really pretty dumb. At least that is how I felt when I was a kid and saw a clown or something (if I wasn't actually scared of the clown/mime, I felt them to be "talking" down to me). The Wiggles are big over here now and now I always think of this movie when I think of them although I believe this film was supposed to not have any sort of connection or reference to them.

This was a great idea. But the over the top characters and the 2nd half of the film where the hysterical Aurora steals the child is a case study of what is wrong with Australian film.

The idea of criminals becoming a hugely popular children's group is clever and could have played our really well if the comedy had come from the real conflicts and characters rather than resorting to a ridiculous subplot that looks completely tacked on.

It amazes me what gets made in this country.

'The Wannabes,' in my opinion was one of THE best comedies of 2003. It had me in stitches laughing for most of the movie. People are saying that 'The Wannabes' was a disappointment, well I say... they are totally wrong! I loved the movie. I highly recommend 'The Wannabes' but just a warning... don't take anyone under the age of 12. I saw it at 11, some parts were inappropriate for an 11 year old to see but overall, I enjoyed it. I give 'The Wannabes' 8.5 out of 10.