Dealing With Destiny

Synopsis: It's the last day of university for good buddies Blake (Luke Arnold), Lloyd (Clayton Moss), Vinnie (Roger Sciberras), and Ricardo (Steve Maresca). Blake and Lloyd are two physics students who have always worked in partnership but only one of them can top the year and win the scholarship which working class Blake needs to continue his studies . Can they realize their ambitions, stay friends. and still make it with the chicks?

Emma-Kate Croghan’s 1996 low-fi comedy, Love and Other Catastrophes, was a surprise hit in its day because, over and above its amusement value, it re-visited the first flush of post-adolescence with the heart-warming glow of bitter-sweet nostalgia. In contrast, it is hard to believe that the characters of  Colm O'Murchu’s film have ever set foot on a university campus, let alone attended a hall of learning. Rather, Dealing With Destiny seems to be largely derived from the rash of late 80s MTV-ized American senior high school movies – it’s all good-natured pranksterism, brightly-coloured sports cars and buxom babes in bikinis set to a pop-rock score. What?! Yes, the direly familiar pop-scored opening fly-over of the Sydney Harbour Bridge announces what is a grotesquely misconstrued Antipodean version of sunny cine-California circa 1986.

Whilst Gale Edwards’ A Heartbeat Away, dollar for dollar, remains the runaway contender for "Worst Australian Film of The Year", in purely qualitative terms Dealing With Destiny is breathing down its neck. It is the sort of film that one cannot begin to comprehend why such an ill-conceived project was ever made (the producer, Paul Condoleon, is also its author), and secondly, when manifested in all its ham-fisted awfulness (there is no point in enumerating its faults), why further effort was expended on releasing it. One can only attribute both to vanity, for not only is there no saving grace to be had, but with its anachronistic stylistic sensibility and juvenile babe-ogling ladishiness it actually is something to be avoided.

Apparently the box office for this film will go to the children’s charity, Variety, a noble gesture but, I expect, one that is going to be entirely symbolic.

 

 

Want more about this film?

    

Want something different?