Australia

When Australian impresario Baz Luhrmann's ode to his native land had its theatrical release, the box office gave a collective shrug and critics reactions ranged from tepid to harsh. If you skipped Australia for either of these reasons, you might want to give it a look in your home theater. While it's not a sublime epic on the order of "Titanic," it's also not dreadful and indeed has a great deal of entertainment in it. Whether you love it or are just mildly amused by it likely depends on how much you love or loathe Luhrmann's unique style.

That style is in full force at the movie's start, with Nicole Kidman as Lady Sarah Ashley, a genteel Brit off to the uncivilized outback of pre-World War II Australia to sell her late husband's cattle ranch. Model airplanes fly over sepia-toned map and pastiche music comments on Kidman's outsized reactions to the gritty town of Darwin and dusty drive to the appropriately named Faraway Downs ranch. She's talked into driving the herd to market to help break a cattle monopoly, the lead instigator being the Nullah, a half-Aboriginal boy, accompanied by The Drover (a grimy Hugh Jackman who later cleans up beautifully in a tuxedo). If you like or can at least get past Luhrmann's winkingly baroque style, this part of the movie is actually great fun. Not the burgeoning romance between Lady Sarah and The Drover (Kidman and Jackman have more chemistry with Brandon Walters, who's somehow charming without being cloying, as Nullah, than they do with each other), but instead the crackerjack action sequence of a cattle stampede.

If the movie had ended with the cattle drive's triumphant conclusion, it might have made for a fun popcorn flick. Instead, like another overstuffed WWII movie before it, "Pearl Harbor," it just goes on too long. While "Pearl Harbor"'s fault was in the grotesque amount of boring movie that preceded the eponymous attack, "Australia" becomes a bit of a bore just before the historically accurate attack on the port city of Darwin. That and the mission to save an island full of half-Aboriginal children are a clich?d yawn compared to the first half of the film. The film is ostensibly about this "Lost Generation" of mixed-race children that the government of Australia tried to weed out from the population, but that topic feels like an excuse to force Lady Sarah and The Drover together and eke out another 45 minutes or so of plot and some more lovely vistas of the Australian outback.

The irritants start to pile up. There's the requisite movie clich? of the heroic non-white minor character who dies fabulously, despite never being given the dignity of a fleshed out identity. There's the fact that The Drover never gets a real name, or that the villain, former Faraway Downs ranch manager Fletcher, maintains an unmotivated Javert-like vengeance for Dullah and Lady Sarah. Topping it all off is the sheer amount of time that the song "Over The Rainbow" is sung by characters or quoted by the movie's score. It makes for a Lurhmann pop culture mish-mash by way of a Muppet Western cum war movie with a little romance thrown in. The more Luhrmann piles it, the less effective the movie becomes.

*SPECIAL FEATURES: Because the DVD includes only two deleted scenes (rightly left on the cutting room floor, one is simply dreadful), the possibility of a future special edition DVD looms.