Big stars often make odd choices for their debuts as directors. That quintessentially American actor, Dustin Hoffman, made the very English (and very creaky) Quartet; Ralph Fiennes chose Coriolanus, one of Shakespeare's least likeable plays.
Russell Crowe's idea must have seemed like pure magic: the most Australian of stories, dripping with modern geopolitical relevance, is retold through the eyes of a (slightly) larrikin spirit, just in time for a fabled centenary. So it's hard to understand why the film he has delivered is so conventional, derivative and flat.
Relying on the writing talents of television vet Andrew Knight (the creditable but hardly groundbreaking Rake) and debutant Andrew Anastasios, Crowe has turned in a by-the-numbers crowd-pleaser with remarkably cheesy battlefield sequences and a story arc that manages to be simultaneously predictable and implausible.
Meanwhile, Crowe's professed intention to educate us all about "the Turkish perspective" seems particularly galling in the light of the film's patronising romantic subplot, which involves a statuesque "Turkish" beauty (Ukrainian Bond girl Kurylenko) barely half his age. The warlike Anzacs may have retreated, but our Russ can still bowl 'em over.
An opening title tells us that the film was inspired by real events, though that turns out to be a single line in a letter about "one old chap [who] managed to get here from Australia, looking for his son's grave". The story, though, is pure fiction and even purer hokum.
