Romper Stomper: Geoffrey Wright

Two films immediately come to mind when I think about Geoffrey Wright's Romper Stomper: Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange (1971) and Kevin MacDonald's The Last King of Scotland (2006). Both films are about human monsters: Alex DeLarge and Idi Amin, respectively. Both films use these characters as a springboard to examine the nature of evil and the depths to which mankind can fall. However, there is a massive difference in how these films approach their monsters. A Clockwork Orange is told from Alex's point of view. The Last King of Scotland invented a fictional secondary character through which we view Idi Amin. This effectively made Idi Amin a supporting character in his own film. Unfortunately, Romper Stomper makes the same mistake. At its center is Hando (Russell Crowe), the leader of a neo-Nazi group in Footscray, Victoria, Australia. While his fellow neo-Nazis are heavily implied to be in the group primarily for the sense of community, he sees the struggle for White Supremacy with total seriousness. He truly believes that non-white races need to be exterminated. Hando is truly terrifying to behold. Every second he is on screen is electrifying. However, instead of focusing on Hando, the film mostly focuses on Gabrielle, a drug-addicted teenager who joins their gang after fleeing from her sexually-abusive father. For a while, the film doesn't truly focus on a "main character," instead documenting the gang's exploits as they go to parties and attack local Vietnamese-Australians. However, after an impressive sequence where an all-out war breaks out between the skinheads and the Vietnamese-Australians (which leaves several of their number dead), Romper Stomper becomes Gabrielle's film. Hando, who had largely dominated the first half of the film, gets pushed to the side. In my opinion, Wright should have either kept the film's narrative focus on the group's dynamics or on Gabrielle from the very start. Or at the very least Wright shouldn't have made Hando, the most fascinating part of the film, a side character in the last half. This is what keeps Romper Stomper, an otherwise incredibly powerful film, from reaching true greatness.

6/10