Director: Glendyn Ivin

Runtime: 100mins

Last Ride may be a road movie about a father and son, but that dismissively easy summary doesn’t do justice to its powerful drama. Hugo Weaving plays Kev, a petty criminal on the run with his young son Chook, played by Tom Russell. Kev and Chook – those are quintessentially Aussie names and this movie, with its wide open spaces and endless dusty roads, probably couldn’t have been made anywhere else.

Weaving gamely loses himself behind tattoos, stubble, VB tinnies and ockerisms like reckon and maaate while Russell is the kind of unselfconscious child actor you quickly forget is acting and who never relies on a cute look to get through a scene. Hopping from one stolen car to the next, the two of them flee from an ambiguous crime that is slowly hinted at through flashbacks as they trek across South Australia. Those flashbacks are also used to fill in an imperfect history of the two that still seems idyllic compared to their current lifestyle, composed as it is of sleeping on benches and eating stolen food. Moments of genuine tenderness between the two are isolated between stretches of danger and bleakness. It’s like Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road, only instead of the apocalypse there’s a much more personal disaster haunting the characters and driving them on.

Kev is a complex character whose flurries of violence are usually followed by squalls of regret and apology, who obviously loves his son but knows on some level that he’s in the running for a mug that says World’s Worst Dad. When his son asks why he went to prison, Kev’s response is to ask which time he means. He’s manipulative, vengeful and he hurts everyone around him. Against the odds, Weaving manages to find just enough humanity in Kev to make us sympathise with a character whose actions are often detestable, for which he should win an award. Also award-worthy are director Glendyn Ivin’s pacing and sense of place. The entire movie meticulously constructed; it feels literally flawless.

Last Ride is sometimes a harrowing experience, exploring a family dynamic that goes beyond dysfunctional, but doing so without sermonising or demonising. It’s a dynamic that some will doubtlessly find extremely resonant. While it’s about familial love and the bond between father and son, it’s also about realising that sometimes that bond can do more harm than good and when it should be broken.

*****

JODY MACGREGOR

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