Set in the Australian outback in the 1880s, the movie follows a series of events following the horrific rape and murder of the Hopkins family, likely committed by the infamous Burns brothers gang. A lawman apprehends a notorious outlaw and gives him nine days to kill his older brother, or else they';ll execute his younger brother.
By the end, it all pays off exactly the way a hundred earlier Westerns did.
City Pages, Minneapolis/St. Paul
August 21, 2009
What the characters have in common--the only thing they have in common, really--is the desire for community amid the well-founded expectation of imminent, violent death.
John Hillcoat's violence-probing Western feels as uncompromisingly bleak, royally widescreen and graphically violent as any Sam Peckinpah opus - a sunburned, grimy-nailed saga of point-blank executions and blood wrung from a cat o' nine tails.
Guy Pearce seems to have boiled himself down into some kind of Guy Pearce Concentrate. Winstone looks like he's been sculpted from the Australian wilderness around him.
In-your-face combativeness is The Proposition's power, and for those of you who value your westerns, the effect is not unlike that of The Wild Bunch or Unforgiven.
It's fitting that The Proposition is set Down Under, because in many ways, it's a reverse Western.
ColeSmithey.com
April 19, 2009
ustralian-born singer/songwriter Nick Cave pens his second film (after "Ghosts ... Of The Civil Dead") and generates a prescient allegory about imperialism.
A beautifully shot tracker's western that brings the Fordian poles of garden and desert to bear on the bushrangers' Outback, this is also a revenge drama of substantial horror.
