The Legend of Ben Hall (2017)
Directed by Matthew Holmes
Written by Matthew Holmes
Starring Jack Martin, Jamie Coffa
Release Date August 1st, 2017
We have a tendency in America to believe that our pop culture is the only culture to embrace our anti-heroes, those rugged criminals whose lives we romanticize into fantasy for reasons we can’t quite rationalize with what these men did. But rhapsodizing about the criminal as pseudo-hero is a truly worldwide phenomenon. The latest example of the worldwide nature of the celebration of anti-heroes comes from Australia with the story of criminal icon Ben Hall, the subject of the Bushranger epic The Legend of Ben Hall which is now available on DVD and On-Demand services in America.
Ben Hall (Jack Martin) was the quintessential Bushranger, a criminal but a criminal with a personal ethic. In the years since Ben Hall has been robbing stagecoaches with his band of criminal brothers, he never took a life. Ben may not exactly be noble, he is an unquestionably dangerous man committing real crimes, but his no murder stance, at the very least, render a criminal with scruples. Ben is haunted by the way in which his wife Biddy (Joanne Dobbin) left him for another man and took their child and he intends to take the boy back once he steals enough money for safe travel to America.
Joining Jack is the far more dangerous outlaw, John Gilbert (Jamie Coffa), whose best quality is his loyalty to Ben; it’s the only thing that keeps Gilbert from becoming an outright psychopath. Together, Ben and John recruit Jon Dunn (William Lee) and they begin a reign of terror on Australian banks that led the banks and the government to extreme measures to fight back. Those extreme measures eventually led to a moment of reckoning for a bloodthirsty army of thug law enforcers and the Australian military which compromised their ethics eventually to put an end to Ben Hall and his gang.
Find my full length review at Geeks.Media
