DUMB CRIMINALS/ DUMB CRIMINALS: THE MOVIE
Australia, 2015, 90 minutes, Colour.
Paul Fenech, Kevin Taumata, Alex Romano, Elle Dawe, Angry Anderson, Andy Mc Phee.
Directed by Paul Fenech.
There is a major reason for seeing this film unless one is a devotee of the work of Paul Fenech, who has had a considerable career in Australian television with miniseries and telememovies on Australian Bogans – by no way upper middle but really low, lower.
Fenech is noted for his television series and films with the suburban working class (and sometimes not working) of the Australian city suburbs, the Housos. There is also an interest in pizza, Fat Pizza and some television series focusing on a pizza shop and deliveries.
In many ways, while the tone is satiric and send-up, the focus is on a lowest common denominator of creating characters, their behaviour, their language, their exploits. While there is spoof of the Australian character, the range of men and women shown in the film presents all kinds of loud-mouth, foul-mouth, sometimes drug-fuelled, mentally-deficient, stupid caricatures.
This one starts with a touch more humanity, two stupid bikies, expelled from their club, haunted by the ghost of the founder who has died in prison, that they should rob money in order to pay for hospital bills of his daughter. They are initially shown in the mountains of Nevada with gangs firing on them and then the film goes back, their robbery, being caught on CCTV and too stupid to cover themselves, time in prison, clashes with bikies, getting out with some really dopey fellow-prisons, setting up a house, having contact with the bikies (led by musician and would-be politician, Angry Anderson).
They team up with a rather stupid friend, with his perpetual bong, who is able to succeed in a robbery where the two heroes fail, again being caught on CCTV. He put on a welder’s mask and thinks he is Ned Kelly and the media respond to him in that way. The bikies have another task for our two – which enables the stars and crew to have some time in Las Vegas’ to track down the accountant for the bikie gang who has absconded with all the money – which leads them back out into the Nevada desert.
One good thing is that the little girl gets better.
Paul Fenech who has written, produced and directed all this material, stars as Rabbit, the alleged brains behind the team – who opens the film with a Presley-like performance of a song about rabbits and their sexual behaviour – and is teamed with New Zealand, Maori actor, Kevin Taumata, more good-natured and a touch more stupid, who has appeared in practically all of Fenech’s work.
To be considered in the development and continuation of Australian cinema – principally because Paul Fenech is there.
