The Boys are Back: saved by its lead

A movie that does everything in its power to perplex and alienate, but is ultimately saved by a winning turn from Clive Owen.

The Boys are Back

Director: Scott Hicks. 

Starring: Clive Owen, Laura Fraser, Nicholas McAnulty 

***

The virtues of zany parenting and male bonding are celebrated to the hilt in The Boys are Back, a movie that does everything in its power to perplex and alienate, but is ultimately saved by a winning turn from its star Clive Owen. He plays the charming sports journalist Joe Warr, an English expatriate based in Adelaide whose life is upended when his darling wife and soul mate Katy (Laura Fraser) dies of cancer early in the first act. Joe is left emotionally cauterised, and must now raise his feisty seven-year-old son Artie (Nicholas McAnulty) by himself.

This initially translates as tension, friction and aborted road trips. But life soon takes an upbeat swing when Joe decides to abandon all traditional parenting rules and to transform his idyllic suburban abode into a filthy, food-stained sty. The problem here, of course, is that the film - which is based on the real-life memoir of the sports writer Simon Carr - doesn't know what to say exactly about all of this. It's torn between applauding Warr's kooky antics (water bomb fights inside the house etc) and yet inserting a moralistic climax about a rogue house party solely to castigate him for the same.

Worse still, McAnulty is a horrendous child actor, with nails-along-the-blackboard delivery, who threatens to implode his every scene. Thus it's left to Owen to concoct a startling turn that can simultaneously convey cocksure arrogance and profound distress, and can ultimately carry an entire film. Which, miraculously, he does.