The factory has closed. David and the boys have got nothing to do but sit around and stay out of trouble. Achieve that and they get a sizeable redundancy. Problem is, the boys are bored. They're on an emotional knife edge but David, the self appointed leader, knows how to keep them together; even Wesley who prefers to read a book than play cards and talk tits. Then Jack turns up. He wears a suit. He used to work at another factory where payouts were lost because someone ratted to head office. Is Jack that man? Will they loose their redundancy? Not if they keep their cool, not if the fiery David can keep it together.
With Colin Friels and David Field as David and Jack, you'd expect powerful things and by and large, that's exactly what you get. Performance is everything as the screws turn tightly and each man plays his hand. Every one of these fairly obnoxious characters has something to loose and as revelations pile up, so does the emotional body-count. Where it leads is as revelatory as it is gut-wrenching.
What undoes much of the great work is writer/director Mark Fiztpatrick's reluctance to take his film far beyond the proscenium arch. Everything about this production is self-concious and stagey – pacing, angles, blocking. Even when events are taken outside two main sets (the factory and Jack's lounge room), you can virtually hear the creak of backgrounds moving. That may be the point but it's a peculiar decision, and proves to be an unsatisfactory one. While The Nothing Men earns several stars for generating raw, distressing emotion, it looses just as many for lack of cinematic courage.
// COLIN FRASER
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