Escape And Evasion

Synopsis: A special forces operative, Seth (Josh McConville), returns to his Gold Coast home after a disastrous mission in Myanmar but struggles with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

The ghost of early career Sylvester Stallone hovers over Australian writer-director Storm Ashwood’s film about male identity in crisis. Its presence is a mixed blessing. On the one hand it imbues the film with a sense of urgency, a feeling that Ashwood has something to get off his chest and by God that’s exactly what he’s going to do. On the other, its articulation is crude with no acknowledgement of the considerable coverage its themes have received in the past forty years. From Hal Ashby’s Coming Home (1978) and Ivan Passer’s Cutter’s Way (1981) to Susanne Bier’s Brothers (2004) and Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker (2008) the effects that war has on its combatants have been extensively explored with intelligence and insight.

The upside of the Stallone factor is that the film is brought into focus through action rather than reflection. The opening scene with a half-crazed Seth about to blow his brains out sets the tone of the film – tense and physically intimidating - and this quality is well-sustained with a bar room brawl scene and an extensive gun battle between Seth and his men and Myanmar troops (in which the good guys are remarkably good shots, the bad guys, remarkably bad). As a director Ashwood’s work is commendable with the visualisation of Seth’s disintegrating, hallucinating psyche well-realized. As a writer, not so much.

The characters and situations are hackneyed stuff. The strung-out vet, the estranged wife and cute daughter, the journalist determined to discover the truth, the unlikely (but highly likely) romance and so on, are all very familiar elements whilst the mission up-river to terminate rogue officer (Steve LeMarquand) is, of course, brazenly lifted holus-bolus from Apocalypse Now (1979). And why Myanmar?  Just to mention the films cited above, Vietnam, Afghanistan were real war zones and that reality was crucial to their efficacy. As far as I know Australian troops have never seen action in Myanmar and the head-scratching decision to set the film there, particularly when the Queensland rainforest is substituted for the Myanmar jungle, puts it in some generic South-east Asian fantasy land. Once again the ghost of Stallone does the film no favours.

At times the dialogue is squirm-inducingly trite, even risible. When the journalist, Rebecca (Bonnie Sveen), whose brother (Hugh Sheridan) disappeared while under Seth’s command confronts him in a bar she actually quotes Simon and Garfunkel. Then she proffers Seth the business card of a psychologist called Freud Lacan. WTF!! Is this supposed to be some kind of witty nod to us. Ashwood evidently liked it so much that it gets another showing a bit later on but I have no idea what it is supposed to mean.  At one point a white-haired oracular ancient appears with some fleeing Rohingya and intones verdicts of doom for Seth and his men. And periodically an army psychological counsellor (Rena Owen) pops up like a lady bullfrog to croak Seth, or anyone else who’ll listen, some tough love.

Ill-judged as all this is Ashwood does however have an ace-in-the-hole and that is McConville whose intense physicality is the force that holds the film together, embodies its spirit and carries us past his director's tendency to ham-fistedness.

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