Film Review - Metal Skin (1995)

Metal Skin is written and directed by Geoffrey Wright who also made Romper Stomper and stars Aden Young as Joe, a young man who starts a night job at a local supermarket and meets Daisy (Ben Mendelsohn) and like Joe he shares an interest in high speed cars, an interest that could prove deadly.

This film I have to say is very problematic and when it was over I had to say that I didn't care for it but before I go into those reasons I do want to talk about the things I did like about the movie:

- The first of these is the car racing scenes themselves, they're excellently filmed and the sound of the engines is fantastic, in a way it reminds you of Mad Max but that film has much more imagination behind it than this film does.

- The second was seeing a young Ben Mendelsohn and he does look very young here and of the 4 main actors comes across as the best one of the lot, it's easy to see why he's had some great success in recent years plus there is a very cool apperance by the man in the Go Go Mobile Yellow Pages ad from many years ago.

- And lastly it was seeing some of the old Australian brands that don't exist anymore ranging from Ampol the Australian Petrol Company (A great Australian friend) to Snappy Tom Cat Food (Remember that) and even Black and Gold products.

But alas all of those positives fail to make up for the fact that the story and characters here are just silly, I mean one is into Black Magic, the other lives with a Mentally Ill Dad and is a grunt who turns to violence to get his way and two of them fight it out in a relationship and their interactions get more and more silly as the film goes on and after a while I just thought to myself "I just don't care about anyone here anymore" and whilst the final chase was going on that was all I could think about.

So all in all Metal Skin has some positive moments but I don't care about any of its characters or the story that was told, avoid this one, 1.5 out of 5.