Deadly

This competent, moderately nail-biting feature belongs to that uneasy genre, the investigative thriller with a political point to make. As often happens, the point (here, the brutal treatment meted out to Australia's aboriginal community) is driven home with hammerhead subtlety and at the same time obscured by hard-guy shenanigans. Ehlers is a Sydney cop sent to the outback to investigate the apparent suicide of an Aboriginal in police custody. Predictably, he's required to rubber-stamp a cover-up, but his maverick tendencies get the better of the situation... Director-writer Storm is good at setting the scene, and the sense of the outback town as a bastion of apartheid and entrenched hatred is the film's strongest point. But the jaw-clenched heroics are pedestrian and the mystery too transparent to hold interest.