Paperback Hero Review

The outback here is a postcard, and cinematographer David Burr shoots it like one, all wheat light, long straight bitumen and road trains crossing the frame at dusk. That gloss is the strongest thing the film has. Hugh Jackman, still a couple of years from anyone outside Australia knowing his name, plays Jack with an easy physical charm that keeps the character on the right side of dishonest, and Claudia Karvan gives Ruby more spine than the script asks for.

The problem is the machinery. Every complication arrives because someone declines to say a sentence they would obviously say, and the story keeps stalling so that a publicity tour, a jealous fiance and a small town talent quest can each take a turn. Antony J. Bowman directs the comic beats far too loudly, especially a wedding sequence played to the back row of a theatre that is not there. There is one genuinely good scene, Jack reading his own prose aloud and hearing how it sounds, where the film briefly understands its own joke about men and sentiment. The rest runs on goodwill, and goodwill is not a structure.