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Kevin Michael Vance
Writer - Portland, Oregon
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Title: THE ROVER
Director: David Michod
Year: 2014
Reviewed: October 16, 2014
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Birthday Cake-Second Highest Rating |
[Rating Definitions]
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I rented "The Rover" with a great deal of trepidation. Michod's very first film "Animal Kingdom" was both boring and pretentious, and yet lauded over by the critics and given a "7.3" rating on imdb.com. Unfortunately, "The Rover" is just as bad, maybe even worse. Story's simple enough; a man gets his car stolen and he combs hell and high water in a somewhat post-apocalyptic world to get it back. But as with "Animal Kingdom" the director fails to establish any kind of connection between the viewer and the characters. We know nothing or next to nothing about them, and this is why we do not care if they live or die. And with a film of this ilk, you and I, MUST care about the characters or 102 minutes is simply just a waste of time. Even the whole car thing, how Guy Pierce's character will kill and lay waste to anything and anyone in his path to get back his car, is never fully revealed until the end. Which would be okay, if we had some context, but we don't. So, it kind'a sucks. There is a scene of Pierce's tortured face lamenting over a pack of dogs in cages, and you get the sense that he likes dogs, however, that is it. Nothing else. And when he pulls a dead dog out of the trunk of the car he has been so inexorably chasing, simply to bury it, you have the same reaction to... pretty much every frame in the film -- meh.
"The Rover" is vapid, ostentatious, pompous and full of itself. It is an arty movie solely made for "arts" sake, and a post-apocalyptic movie that feels like an inexplicable soap-opera drama. Guy Pierce's character will kill anyone and anything to get back his car and bury a dog and we don't know why... and we don't care. "The Rover" gets a BIRTHDAY CAKE review simply because there are some starkly beautiful shots of Australia, and Pierce's performance, albeit bogged down by an inept, amateurish screenplay, is as always riveting.
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