Rating of
3/4
"Chopper" by Yojimbo
Yojimbo - wrote on 02/19/12
An almost unrecognisable Eric Bana plays notorious criminal Mark "Chopper" Read whose "memoirs" and musings on life made him one of Australia's best selling authors of all time. It's actually very difficult to tell how much of this film is true, and how much is Read's creative "embellishments"; fact and fiction merge to the point where the same events are shown two or three times to show Read's version, the witness' version and (maybe!) the truth. But what definitely comes through is Chopper's larger than life persona, and he is in turns funny, charismatic, frightening and above all, a stark raving lunatic. He makes Tommy from Goodfellas look like the picture of emotional stability. It is a very interesting character study of a man who has no concept whatsoever of playing by society's rules, and as such it makes for a funny and disturbing story as you never really know what he is going to do next; he was literally a ticking time bomb of paranoic violence and he was just as likely to give you a big, friendly bear hug and a fistful of cash as a knife blade in your eye socket. Bana is fantastic in the lead role in a performance he is yet to match since his relocation to Hollywood, but this is the kind of part that quite possibly comes along once in a lifetime. The one flaw is that the early scenes in prison are the most interesting, the rest of the story never quite measuring up to the opening but otherwise it's a bit of a must see for anyone interested in true (!) life crime.
