It is those events that the young teenager encounters when the thugs who killed his father came looking for him and his family. Now, this young teenager is forced to go through the harsh experience and escape with his mother from their home. When this past came back with vengeance, Wanda appeared to be no longer working, but chose to fight the sins of the past that provoked real noise.
You know the film is off to a paltry start when you see the rookie Rick Gonzalez attempt to strut bad-boy, awww-yeah stuff. Instead, he feels like a 21-year-old boy just going through puberty.
Clearly aware of the impact of visual style on the narrative, Jonathan Ogilvie uses a stylised 1920 Australian setting for a love triangle that involves all the basic drivers of human frailty
More care seems to have been taken with the cut of Gonzalez's sideburns than with the shape of the story, and the hyperbolic soundtrack does most of the work of the mise en scene.
For a film about growing up, Illegal Tender loses itself in a lot of silly juvenilia.
San Francisco Chronicle
August 24, 2007
Plenty of movies have combined a blazing-guns revenge story with a family dynamics drama, but Illegal Tender never gets the mixture right, lurching between bullet-happy shootouts and overwrought domestic content.
