Get Your Knives Sharpened for Chopper

by Brandon Judell


Imagine being sealed in a closet with 3 tarantulas, 2 asps and Charlton Heston. That's what watching this biopic of Australia's most notorious criminal is like.

Brutally violent, comically bloody, and nonstop discomfiting, if you're easily nauseated, you've been forewarned.

Mark "Chopper" Read, as superbly realized by Eric Bana, is a stocky, homophobic, heavily tattooed oaf unable to control his own hell-bent behavior. Often after every sadistic, possibly lethal act of his, a sense of great regret comes over this life criminal, sort of like Charlie Brown as a member of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre clan.

Why after stabbing a fellow inmate in the neck for no reason, Chopper offers a cigarette to the chap who's lying in his still spurting plasma. Then after shooting a drug dealer pointblank in the stomach, he'll drive him to the hospital. As for his possibly cheating girlfriend, he bangs her mother in the face with his head and then says to his galpal, "Look what you made me do."

But the scene that everyone will be talking about is the one in which he does Van Gogh one better. When the prison authorities won't relocate him to the cell he wants, Chopper has both of his own ears sliced off to force them in to action.

Happily, Chopper's bravado has a merry side, too. When he sees a saucy gal in a bar, to win her over, he unzips and allows his massive, semi-erect appendage to hang free for all to see while keep chatting away to some policemen. (The critics I polled after the screening, who were of both lesbian and gay persuasions, were clearly divided on whether the cock we see was real or not.)

Rubber or flesh aside, writer/director Andrew Dominik, who arrives in theaters from the music video world, has created a visually arresting, fatally unforgettable tale of a man who makes you ashamed to be human. But it still might make you want to visit Australia, especially since Chopper is now out of prison and available for brunch.