Australia: Critic Reviews

Missing the 'e' in epic, the filmmaker has produced a labored pic, weighed down by the very artifice that is traditionally his specialty.

Australia is a pastiche of genres and references wrapped up into one horse-galloping, cattle-stampeding, camera-swooping, music-swelling, widescreen package.

We are left with slow-moving insincerity and conceit, summoned up in the flatulence of that title: Australia, a country reborn in terms of facetious Hollywood cliches.

Australia tries to be a sprawling, romantic epic. Instead, it's a melodramatic exercise in tedium.

A wildly ambitious, luridly indulgent spectacle of romance, action, melodrama and historic revisionism, Australia is windy, overblown, utterly preposterous and insanely entertaining.

Australia strains to do it all, and finally all you can see is the strain.

Though Luhrmann starts with plenty of potential, he squanders it almost immediately.

Sometimes Luhrmann seems to be living in a Dreamtime of his own; his movie is all over the map. But what a gorgeous map it is.

Comedy and tragedy, action and melodrama, full measures of quirk and swoon: It's just a plain good time at the movies.

Australia provides some remarkable moments: remarkably beautiful, remarkably imaginative and, against all odds, genuinely moving, which in a movie this overwrought and overblown is, in itself, remarkable.

Even more than a Western, Australia is a musical without a songbook. Its emotions are large, its rhythms bold.

Jackman has musical-theater chops and knows how to sell material this ham-handed; Kidman isn't quite as deft.

Luhrmann is drawn to kitsch as inevitably as a bear to honey.

What a gorgeous film, what strong performances, what exhilarating images and -- yes, what sweeping romantic melodrama.

Australia offers everything from a cattle drive to Nicole Kidman's rendition of "Over the Rainbow" to hordes of Japanese Zeros zeroing in on screaming children during the early 1942 attack on Darwin in Australia's Northern Territory, two months aft

Long in the making -- and almost as long in the watching -- Baz Luhrmann's Australia is epic piffle.

It's not Luhrmann's best work to date, but it has crowd-rousing flair to spare.

It's an endurance test that ends in moans of recognition as characters seem to be acting out scenes from other, better movies. Really, you don't want to sit through this.

If Luhrmann takes too long to tell the tale, it is at least a tale worth telling, shining a light on racism and mistreatment, folding it neatly into a crowded film that entertains us for most of the way.

I must confess that I might have been harder on Mr. Luhrmann's film if I had not remained entranced by Ms. Kidman.

Embracing grand old-school melodrama while critiquing racist old-fashioned politics, Baz Luhrmann's grandiose Australia provides a luxurious bumpy ride.

Never boring but often exhausting, Australia finally pulls itself together for an emotionally satisfying ending. Or six. Pass the gravy.

It's messy and overwrought. But ambition this grand is worth two hours and 40 minutes of Aussie scenery, history (fudged), romance and war.

At once sprawling and intimate, melodramatic and comic, magnificent and utterly bonkers, it bears entertaining witness to Luhrmann's love of old movies and his Down Under homeland.