Like his tendency to draw blood and then ask his victim if he’s okay while suffering genuine remorse, even offering one victim a cigarette as he slowly expires in a pool of his own blood, or his genuine indignation at the police officers who won’t believe him when he tries to take credit for a killing. He’s also adept when it comes to the sometimes vicious black humor with which the film is spiked and that serves not so much to lighten the mood as to give further insight into the workings of the mind of a guy who’s just not right. It helps to sell Chopper as a cheerful guy, ready with a smile and a mood that can turn convincingly from happy to homicidal on a dime.
CHOPPER MOVIE CODE
It’s part of his complicated but strict moral code that includes never driving someone you’ve just shot to the hospital (apparently it’s insulting to the person you’ve shot).īana, beefed up and sporting teeth that are either rotten or badly gilded, still has the face of an angel, even when those big brown eyes turn cold staring down the barrel of a gun.
While little about his formative years is specifically spelled out, we learn all we need to know when Chopper explains that when your mother stabs you, you don’t turn her in to the police, you get yourself to the hospital and that’s that. The focus is on the lifestyle of a killer. By the end, the particulars of what happened when may not be perfectly clear, but that’s not important. The pieces of Chopper’s life are strung together, leaping back and forth through time, hitting the high and the low lights with equal intensity. Bleached and overexposed in the government lock-up, the sickly green cast to the squalor of an ex-con’s bleak apartment, the film speeded up ever so slightly as Chopper and his pals snort coke. The story is episodic, but filmed with some ingenious visuals that perfectly set the tone of the unreality (for us, anyway) of Chopper’s universe.
Fortunately for Bana and for us, the Sundance Channel will be running this Australian import throughout July.Īdapting his film freely from the bestselling autobiography written by Mark “Chopper” Read, writer-director Andrew Dominik eschews a strictly narrative style. Before he was the geek turned unjolly green giant in THE HULK, before he was part of the hapless band of soldiers storming Mogadishu in BLACK HAWK DOWN, Eric Bana turned in a dazzling performance as the most personable psychopath you can imagine in CHOPPER.
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