MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Romper Stomper’: Numbing Violence Without a Point

The Melbourne skinheads in “Romper Stomper” are definitely not coiffed by Christophe. They spend their days lolling about their swastika-adorned hide-outs, or bashing Vietnamese immigrants. It doesn’t take much to set off their hair-trigger retaliations; they’re perpetually seething, and their violence comes in shocking, explosive bursts. This lower-depths hell is the Australian entry in a larger, global hell where out-of-work, dispossessed white kids--and not only from the working class--work up their racist rage as a way to feel alive.

A great movie could be pulled from this horror but writer-director Geoffrey Wright gets taken in by all the mayhem and clobbering. There’s not a whole lot going on in “Romper Stomper” (at the Nuart) except for romping and stomping, and, after awhile, it becomes not only exhausting but offensive: We want more from this grotesque panorama than free-style scenes of brutality interspersed with wan little nuggets of class-consciousness.

Wright focuses on three kids: Hando (Russell Crowe), the gang’s leader; Davey (Daniel Pollock), his closest ally, and Gabe (Jacqueline McKenzie), the upper-class wastrel who falls in with them. Hando is the scariest. His Adam’s apple has Skinhead tattooed across it, his sullen gaze is unfettered with reason. (In the film’s best moment, he reads passages from “Mein Kampf” to an adoring Gabe while his eyes mist over). Gabe, who has been sexually abused by her filthy rich movie-producer father, leads the gang into her father’s compound for some big-time bashing a la “Clockwork Orange.” We’re meant to see the father as not just slime but wealthy slime; and, what’s more, he apparently makes his money producing TV commercials and gory films.

How do you create drama from a cast of insensate toughs? If you’re an artist, you try to demonstrate that these toughs are not so removed from us that they’re monsters. Wright does indeed go in for some weak-tea sentimentalizing; he wants to get points for showing that they are reduced to lonely, lost kids whenever their thoughts turn from bashing. But these sections of the NC-17-rated film are the least convincing and the most conventional. When Gabe and Davey turn into poor misunderstood youths, the rank Melbourne air is sweetened with the purest whiff of Hollywood. You can’t really trust “Romper Stomper” because, while it aims to be pioneering, it summons up the specters of Dean and Brando and Vic Morrow with a vengeance.

‘Romper Stomper’

Russell Crowe: Hando

Daniel Pollock: Davey

Jacqueline McKenzie: Gabe

Alex Scott: Martin

An Academy Entertainment presentation. Writer-Director Geoffrey Wright. Producers Daniel Scahrf and Ian Pringle. Cinematographer Ron Hagen. Editor Bill Murphy. Costumes Anna Borghesi. Music John Clifford White. Production design Steven Jones-Evans. Running time: 1 hour, 47 minutes.

MPAA-rated NC-17 (violence, strong language, sex).