You’d have thought that Ned Kelly would be an ideal fit with the movies – a glamorous outlaw, a rebel son of immigrants who fought the law (and the law won), a proto-superhero who had his own outfit, if you count a plate-steel suit as an outfit.
And yet, of the modern versions (there are older, mostly lost-in-time versions going back as far as 1906), none quite hits the spot. The Mick Jagger one, from 1970, suffers from Mick Jagger being in it. The Heath Ledger one, from 2003, presented Kelly as a saint and so made him boring. And now True History of the Kelly Gang from 2019, a Justin Kurzel movie and so bristling with gnarly glamour, dives off up several interesting avenues and eventually loses sight of its main character.
Ned (George MacKay) is the son of an inadequate dad, with a fiercely protective and yet magisterially neglectful mother (Essie Davis). After falling in with gruff ocker bastard Harry Power (Russell Crowe), who teaches him how to be a man, Ned falls foul of lawman Sergeant O’Neil (Charlie Hunnam), who is also sniffing around after his mother, goes to jail, becomes a bare-knuckle fighter and eventually, with only 40 minutes of running time left, gets together the gang that’s the basis of his fame, and, referring back to the title, supposedly the subject of the film.
Those bare bones of a plot fight for space with several sub-themes. There’s the one about cross-dressing, which Ned’s brother, Dan (Earl Cave, son of Nick) and his father are both into, and Ned goes in for it too on occasion, more to intimidate people than for sexual kinks.
There’s also un-dressing. This is a movie unafraid of the male torso. But then if Charlie Hunnam is in a film there’s a certain clamour for him to get his top off. And he does not disappoint – the hours that man has done in the gym. But MacKay has done even more, and at 12 years younger than Hunnam he is the definition of “cut”, “buff”, “henched”, with subdermal veins and tendons popping and total dehydration surely only just around the corner.
Mutual man-love also winds through this movie like a threat. There’s a relentless, locker-room interest in male genitalia, (with shooting them off in the case of Harry Power), and suggestions that Ned and his bestie, Joe Byrne (Sean Keenan), might have feelings for each other that go beyond the comradely. When Sergeant O’Neil’s sidekick, Constable Fitzpatrick (Nicholas Hoult), arrives on the scene, there’s also a suggestion that Ned and he have something bubbling away below the waistline.
It’s all the mother’s fault, the film somewhat old-fashionedly surmises, Shaun Grant’s adaptation of Peter Carey’s original novel laying the blame for wayward behaviour of all sorts at Ellen Kelly’s intensity of feeling for her son.
It’s the True History of Ma Kelly, really, the voiceover by MacKay’s Ned not enough to shift the focus away from her and back onto him and, let’s face it, an admission by all involved that something isn’t quite right.
It does not hang together and that is a great shame because so much great stuff is here. Look at Hoult, for instance, really great, in a very small role. But then none of the performances are shabby. MacKay, Hunnam, Crowe (a short but tangy appearance) and Davis most obviously.
Kurzel’s shooting of the landscape matches his lean, taut, muscular actors – he loves his blasted trees – and he really knows how to shoot a gunfight in an entirely different way. The one that concludes the film is done as if on hallucinogens, the light strobing away as the cops hit the Kelly gang’s iron-clad refuge with countless bullets.
The real Ned Kelly ended up dead aged 25, having packed an awful lot in to a short life. It was eventful, as is this film. It’s pretty interesting, good-looking, flavoursome, but it’s just not quite there.
True History of the Kelly Gang – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2023
