GUY PEARCE STARRING IN THE ROVER

2014 rating: *1/2

It’s been ten years since “The Collapse,” turning the Outback into something resembling the MAD MAX post apocalyptic future, only there's no nuclear fallout and the vehicles are mundane cars you'd see in any public parking lot… And in this desperate purgatory, there's only one long and tedious road where we first see Guy Pearce's slowburn, Spaghetti Western style loner, Eric, till he stops at a dilapidated joint where we get a glimpse of a future where gas, food, animals and women are scarce.

The setup is melancholy and hypnotic, and the gears begin grinding as we cut to a group of eclectic convicts who, long story short, steals Eric’s ride: from here on, THE ROVER has Eric on a metronomic odyssey to, quite simply, get his car back.

He meets up with the abandoned little brother of the main thief. Enter Robert Pattison’s Rey, a somewhat mysterious character until Eric points out his mental instability... then it becomes clear Rey's not playing with a full deck. The young TWILIGHT actor tries too hard and doesn’t try hard enough. During bouts of overlong diatribes, his muddled accent, reaching for white trash, sounds like a hybrid of SLINGBLADE and FORREST GUMP. Worse yet, he’s simply not an interesting human being, and hardly evokes the needed vulnerability to make the older Eric a legitimate world-weary mentor: On his own, Pearce creates a pretty decent anti-hero, always on the verge of either breaking down or busting heads, and the mysterious element of his stolen car’s importance is the peripheral hook to follow through a brooding mainline. But the ominous futureworld he’s stuck in gets extremely bland, despite sporadic extra-loud gunfights and a twist ending that, while summing up Eric’s morose motivation throughout, leaves a story that relied on mellow suspense to end with a banal whimper.