Last Ride

100 minutes | Rated R

Having committed some sort of serious crime, a violent ex-convict (Hugo Weaving) goes on the lam with his young son. The set-up for this gloomy Australian drama (2009) promises a throwback to the briskly paced film noir of the 1940s, but director Glendyn Ivin weighs down the story with film-school affectations: shock-cut flashbacks, moody nature imagery, stretches in which the characters sit around doing little of interest, and superfluous references to Terrence Malick's Badlands. Australia has produced some genuinely artful crime films in recent years—The Square, Animal Kingdom, The Snowtown Murders—but this isn't one of them. By Ben Sachs