With that said, now let’s get into the issues, chief amongst which was very uneven acting. While support characters can break a film if they are unbelievable, it is even more deadly to credibility to have main characters who are palpably false.
Before we get into the problems, lets start with the successes of the acting this piece. Normally, when I talk about uneven acting from the main actors in a film where the director is playing the lead, the uneven acting is almost always coming from the director himself. (Hey, I’ve been there myself, too!) However, in this situation, Istvan did a pretty good job as the main character, the Stranger. His portrayal was believable and stoically understandable, for the most part.
Additionally, a lot of the other actors’ performances ranged from competent to impressive. Perhaps the most compelling character was Crackhead Joe (Joelson Kuerten), a strangely endearing drug addict who will sell out anyone to get a fix. Another great performance was found in Cecillie Bull’s compelling portrayal of Rebecca “Peaches” O’Grady—Archie’s girlfriend, J.T.’s mistress, and Chooch’s sister.
Unfortunately, a couple of the other main characters were extremely unbelievable. This was largely because their performances were too one dimensional and exaggeratedly melodramatic. In my experience with both the theater and cinema, this often happens when stage actors make the transition to becoming film actors, as the stage is a much larger canvas than the screen is. It often takes folks new to film acting a while to use "subtlety and nuance" over "big and loud" to convey emotions. (Of course, this has a greater tendency to happen when a director stars in his own film. Even if his own character is believable, he doesn't have nearly as much time to help coach his other actors.)
While the overall nature of Mr. Criste’s acting as the Stranger was good, one issue did arise from his performance. This issue came from the fact that, at times, a European-sounding accent overwhelmed the clipped American accent he used for most of the film. The shifting accents made the Tex-Mex persona of the Stranger hard to buy into when they occurred. Fortunately, there aren’t too many times the accent drifts, so redubbing these problematic lines should be able take care of these issues fairly well. (To learn the basics of setting up a home ADR studio, check out our article on this here.) For future films, having one’s audio guy pay special attention for potentially drifting accents can prevent these sorts of things.
Escape from Darwin looks amazing, utilizing a good deal of sunlight to expose the digital frames of the Panasonic HVX200 and JVC 100U that were the acquisition cameras for this film. While there were times where uncontrolled backlighting behind actors might have been a mistake, the starry silhouettes the backlighting created look stylistic enough (and was usually brief enough) that it seemed intentional.
The shot composition for this film was excellent, with a cinematographic look that was easily on par with cult classics like El Mariachi and Tombstone. As to the camera movement, most of the shots in the film were clearly hand held, but, fortunately, the camera operators were pretty well trained so that the ragged movement that handheld creates was kept decently in check. (There were a few Bourne Supremacy moments, but, for the most part, the camera movement did not cause nausea or migraines.)
The editing was also pretty well realized, which made it fairly easy to follow the storyline. In addition to the great camerawork, intelligent use of natural lighting, and the competent editing, the campy visual effects that grindhouse films are known for was another area that this film excelled at. While there were a few somewhat questionable effects, most of the blood and gore of this film held up to intense scrutiny, a testament to the makeup choices made by the filmmaker. Besides the gore effects, the actual shootouts were well set up, choreographed, and shot.