Ned Kelly [HD]

A Moving Account
For most people Down Under, the name Ned Kelly elicits feelings ranging from near religious devotion and hero-worship to the most bitter, deep-seated hatred. Like many figures who have come to be regarded as popular heroes, there has been the accretion of a lot of legend to the name of Ned Kelly, which can make getting to the real man a tall order.

The movie, Ned Kelly, is based in the southern state of Victoria, (it was filmed just outside Melbourne), and follows the Kelly Gang through the unjust imprisonment of Ned Kelly (Heath Ledger) and then his mother after false accusations from a Victorian Police officer. Other injustices are committed against the Kelly's and their friends, which only increases Kelly's resolve to hit back. The film climaxes in the last stand made at Glenrowan, and the tragedy that it was.

The movie is excellently shot and uses the scenery of Victoria well to give an atmosphere and aura of colonial roughness contrasted with the well-to-do...

Injustice Mushrooms
Gregor Jordan's version of "Ned Kelly" may not be quite as playful as the 1970 Mick Jagger version, but it is a well-done recounting of this Australian legend. Jordan packs the cast with Australian actors who deliver. Australian Heath Ledger delivers a controlled performance that shows great force. Ned Kelly shows a different side of Ledger than we've seen in "10 Things I Hate About You," "A Knight's Tale" or "Monster's Ball." It may come closest to the tightly wound performance he offered in "The Order." Ledger also starred in Gregor Jordan's first film in 1999, "Two Hands," which I have yet to see; so this is their second teaming.

Orlando Bloom does a great job as Kelly's good friend and sidekick. Quite different than "Pirates of the Caribbean," we get to see a Bloom who is a Romeo, constantly hitting on girls with a twinkle in his eye. Most hilarious is his scene with Australian Brenda Griffiths as the bank president's wife where he seduces her a floor above where...

The Siege of Glenrowan and the last stand of Ned Kelly
I learned from "Breaker Morant" and "Gallipoli" that the British had little regard for Australian soldiers so it was not surprising to learn from this 2003 version of the "Ned Kelly" story that the British Down Under treated the locals with similar disdain. When it turns out that the title character is also of Irish decent, well, that is just pouring it on when you cross reference all of the films in which the British make the Irish suffer. It is easy enough to explain to the casual viewer that Ned Kelly is the Australian equivalent of Jesse James, but that misses the point that Kelly was a much more popular figure in his land that James was (as witnessed at the 2000 Olympics in Sydney where dancers wearing Kelly's iron helmet with the slit, inspired by Sidney Nolan's Ned Kelly paintings) and that his ending was much more fascinating than that of the American outlaw.

The story of Ned Kelly as told in Gregor Jordan's film is fairly straightforward. Young Ned (Heath...

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