Cast: Hugh Jackman, Nicole Kidman, Brandon Walters 
Directed by Baz Luhrmann
Running time: 2hrs 45minutes

"Australia" shows all the signs of having been a labour of love for director Baz Luhrmann. One problem: It's his love, and hard labour for the audience. A mixture of horrendously bad acting, convenient plot turns and politically correct sentimentality, the film has more endings than the third "Lord of the Rings" film and clocks in at nearly three hours and it feels even longer. Luhrmann aims for epic scope and ends up with pretty pictures. He veers from earnest drama to brisk comedy and then tries to hold it together with awkward voiceover narration. Within five minutes, "Australia" seems headed for trouble. Unfortunately it gets there and stays there.

Luhrmann develops a bad habit in "Australia": He keeps insisting his audience feel emotions his picture simply can't incite. When he wants a warm feeling, he has composer Dave Hirschfelder (well done on missing out on this bilge Mr. Craig Armstrong) crank up the violins. When he wants to indicate triumph, out comes the horn section. Sometimes he'll show a character getting all choked up - before we even see what the character is looking at. Yet with all that prodding, "Australia" never connects. It's too dizzy and zany to be taken seriously, too self-serious to be taken comically, and too safely in the realm of the magical to make us ever really fear for the characters' safety. The magical element comes by way of an Aborigine witch doctor, who keeps constant watch over the main characters from a nearby mountain. No matter where the characters travel, by car or horse, there's always a mountain for this geezer, who shows up on his own and always arrives on time. If there's danger, if things seem really hopeless, he's the handyman, always ready with an appropriate spell. Whenever the cattle are about to stampede - or some villain is pointing his gun - count to 10 and watch as the camera pans up the mountain and the old man goes into his dance. The first time he saves the day establishes the pattern. From then on "Australia" loses all sense of threat.

The action is set in the northern part of the country in the early days of World War II. Nicole Kidman plays Lady Sarah, a wealthy and very proper Englishwoman who inherits an Australian cattle ranch. Kidman rolls out all the English cliches she can think of for this role, playing Sarah as repressed and snooty, walking stiffly, as though in a constant comic tizzy. She's a figure of farce, very like a supporting stuffed shirt in an Oscar Wilde play, and considering that Sarah is intended to be the leading lady, it's a bizarre choice on Kidman's part. In truth, Kidman has never seemed so lost in a role. Couldn't Luhrmann tell she was drowning? This is a fine actress. Couldn't he help her? Likewise, never has Kidman, a screen beauty, ever looked so unappealing onscreen, caught in a triangulation between an absurd characterisation, an unflattering hairstyle and ugly clothing. Why didn't Luhrmann look out for her? Why did he leave her twisting in the Australian wind? He especially owed her special consideration, knowing he was placing her in the same frame with Hugh Jackman, who, as an Australian cowboy, has never looked better in his life - and his life before this wasn't so bad, either. It's not uncommon for beautiful actresses to inspire hushed awe in audiences, but with actors, it's rare. But Jackman has several close-ups in "Australia" in which the whole flick seems to stop, as everyone in the cinema is supposed to stop breathing and stare at this guy, as though he were Greta Garbo. Or Michelangelo's David. Or a solar eclipse.

The main action of "Australia" - or at least the first part of it - involves Sarah, as the newly minted cattle baron moving her livestock across the country. To that end, she hires Drover (Jackman), who doesn't like her at first, because that's how it usually works in the movies. (People never like each other at first.) Among the others along for the ride is Nullah (Brandon Walters), a half-Aborigine boy, who narrates the film. He narrates it, even though he's in no position to tell some of the stories he extrapolates. Maybe the witch doctor tells him. That's his grandfather. A distinction should be made. "Australia" is not an inept piece of filmmaking. Walk into the film and watch any two minutes, and it will seem like a fine picture. It is well made, in the sense that it's a completely realised expression ... but of a misbegotten vision. Luhrmann had an idea to portray Australia as a barnstorming, rollicking, rip-roaring country, but it all comes off effortful and tiresome. He had an idea to portray the nobility of the Aborigines, and he does to a degree, but the treatment comes across as careful and worshipful. Finally, he had an idea to show how beautiful Australia can be, but then he forgot to integrate these images into some statement or feeling about the soul of the place. It's the saddest thing in film - the saddest thing in art - when this kind of thing happens. Luhrmann made the picture he wanted to make. It just wasn't worth the effort.

Wily, high-strung, earnest, Arabic speaking CIA operative Roger Ferris (Leonardo DiCaprio), stationed in the Middle East, is assigned by his cunning, untrustworthy and pragmatic immediate boss, the chubby, crude and antagonistic self-satisfied Washington-based desk-warrior Ed Hoffman (Russell Crowe), who skirts the law in his zeal to defend national security, to track down Islamic terrorists involved in the recent bombings of civilians and to possibly prevent another bombing. Ed's self-righteous, cynical philosophy is that the ends justify the means and that no one is innocent. The hands-on always snappy hungry boss keeps regular tabs on his field agents by satellite and the laptop, and even by cellphone while tending to personal business such as taking his son to school or his daughter to a football match - cue Glasgow Celtic on the telly!). Rewarded with a promotion as the Agency's top dog in Jordan (though still stationed at Langley), the gung-ho workaholic Ed compromises his relationship with the suave but brutal Jordanian intelligence head Hani (the supreme Mark Strong) when he tries to snatch his Arabic operative informer Karami to work for the CIA. Hani is all for the partnership with the Americans, but tells Ferris it's over if he lies to him. Ferris doesn't tell Hani that he concocted a plan to nab one of the world's most dangerous terrorists, the Islamic extremist mastermind Al-Saleeem (Alon Aboutboul, an Israeli actor), linked to a rash of suicide bombings in Europe. Since the terrorists are aware that the CIA can track them through cellphones, they have ceased their chatter. Thereby the resourceful Ed has the CIA contracted computer genius Garland (Simon McBurney) create a phony competing terrorist organization and make an innocent minor terrorist figure, a pious Muslim more interested in the money than the cause, a successful Dubai architect (Ali Suliman), the unwitting head. With that, Ferris finds his credibility is now questioned by Hani, since the partner was left out in the cold and discovers the truth the hard way. Ferris has also now placed the lives of his friends and colleagues at risk. When Ferris goes to an Amman clinic for rabies shots, he's attracted to beautiful Iranian nurse Aisha (Golshifteh Farahani) and she invites him to dinner to meet her older sister for approval to date. Soon the innocent nurse becomes part of the political intrigue.

What it all amounts to, is the filmmaker telling us the agents on the ground know more about what's going down with the terrorists than their arsehole superiors in Washington and that the Washington bureaucrats are mostly motivated by political concerns and blind personal ambitions. In other words, the War on Terror is being messed up by lies told by the so-called good guys, that the know-nothing Washington bureaucrats are inept, and the ones best suited for spy work, the risk-taking field operatives, are being left in the lurch by the incompetents who only talk a good game.

The plot-heavy film throws together too many half-baked ideas, offers mostly clunky ideology as readily as one might be served cous cous in a Middle East restaurant and does not have the conviction to see things clearly through that it brings up about the conflicted War on Terrorism, as Scott can't decide just where he's going with this overlong and overstuffed topical thriller. It just moves along from Iraq, Turkey, Syria, Jordan, Dubai, England, Amsterdam, Washington D.C. and Langley, and there always seems to be a gunfight, torture, or fireball explosion to keep you mindlessly entertained. 

Though weak on political analysis, the loud explosions should keep you awake. There's also a picture stealing catchy performance by Mark Strong, a winsome sweet one by Golshifteh Farahani, a diverting twisty intense one by a bearded DiCaprio and a creepy unfunny comic relief one by Crowe (who put on some 6 stone/50 pounds to play the supporting part of a dirtbag CIA bigwig and sports a strong Arkansas accent). It's a war flick for our times, that rails against lies but only lies to us about what it believes (which could be part of its cynical theme, of not to trust anyone). It serves up cyberspace as the battlefield of the New World. But don't expect too much more than good location shots, good action sequences and a well-crafted film (which makes it entertaining enough for someone like me, who never expected much more). Just don't ask me what the hero actually believes in or what the film was really trying to say, as I'm left with the impression that Ferris is willing to chuck his career more for a hotty nurse than over a political belief and that Ed, the film's heavy, the manipulative opposite of Ferris, merely reflects a simplistic superpower attitude that the Middle East is a scummy place that just happens to be valuable because it has oil but otherwise is a place that America should dump on.