Force of Nature: The Dry 2 Review
Eric Bana continues to be magnetic as Aaron Falk, but Force of Nature suffers under the weight of its source material.
Aaron Falk (Eric Bana) gets a call from an informant he is working for a financial crime, Alice (Anna Torv). The call cuts out with bad reception, but she sounds afraid. Later, the group of employees she’s with on a corporate hiking retreat emerge from 3 days lost in the Girralong Ranges, but Alice is nowhere to be seen. Falk heads to the mountains to try and help find the lost Alice, but in the process has to weigh up whether she has truly just gone missing, or if the work they were doing together and the four staff members who left the bush without her are all interconnected.
The Dry was a wonderful example of Australian filmmaking; something that felt Australian without ever beating you over the head with it. It was a smash hit with audiences, even in a tough landscape with the pandemic.
Force of Nature (awkwardly subtitled The Dry 2) tries to recreate the same success, or even better it. And the first thing to say about it is that it thankfully once again retains that same sense of being Australian, without ever feeling overly so. Instead, this is yet another engrossing crime drama, with strong performances and remarkable visuals.
Eric Bana is fantastic as Aaron Falk, bringing intensity, emotion, and a believable passion for justice. Around him, the cast hits varying strides of success. Deborah Lee-Furness is excellent, as is Sisi Stringer and Anna Torv, but Richard Roxborough feels miscast and Robin McLeavy misfires.
Visually, the film is a really strong proposition. Director Robert Connolly turns the Aussie rainforest into a foreboding beast; somewhere you truly feel you could get lost. As someone who had read the book, this film took the natural landscape to another level.
Ultimately, where Force of Nature: The Dry 2 falters is not in the execution, but rather in the seed. The novel poses such an interesting posture for a murder mystery; one in which the detective has no real crime scene to investigate, and is in a race against the clock, the only evidence a hunch that it must somehow be connected to his investigation and the only clues found in speaking to those who were out there with Alice. But while it felt unique and worked well in written form, on the big screen it saps the film of energy. The first Aaron Falk film followed a more traditional cold case format, and did so with aplomb. Here, in attempting to break the mold, it highlights the benefits of that very mold.
