I'm sure that not many people outside of Australia have ever heard of the legend of Ned Kelly. I once saw a documentary about the man, but that's the only time I once saw or heard anything about him. And I guess that this might be the biggest problem this movie will have to face. No-one knows anything about it and probably not many people will care about the subject.
The movie tells the story of Ned Kelly's life. The Irish immigrant has lived in north-west Victoria all his life, but has never been very welcome by the authorities. The police always accuses him of everything they can think of and they keep harassing his family. When Kelly is fed up with the way everything goes, he forms a gang with his brother and two other men. They start robbing banks and even hijack an entire town for 3 days. All this violence leads to a man hunt organized by the police and when they kill three policemen, they are outlawed. Finally they take over a pub in Glenrowan, where they have a party with all the visitors, waiting for a train full of police to derail at a part of the track that they tore up. But the train is able to stop in time because someone warns them and what will follow is a battle on life and death between the police and the four gunmen...
It's very hard to tell whether all of what is shown in the movie is true or false. I guess nobody really knows, because there will always be two camps who will each tell their own truth: one camp says he was a hero, some kind of Robin Hood, the others will say he was an ordinary criminal, a murderer and a thief. I really couldn't tell you which of them is right, perhaps both are, but what I can tell you is that the facts in the movie as well as is the documentary were about the same.
This movie was a nice addition to the documentary I once saw and I really enjoyed the performances of all the actors. Heath Ledger, Orlando Bloom, Naomi Watts, Geoffrey Rush are all actors who are pretty well known, but even the lesser known actors show in this production that they all know what good acting should look like. I really enjoyed this movie and I give it a 7.5/10
