In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

It's an amazing and heartbreaking story.

It really made me laugh, but for some moments I was tearing up because I could relate so much.

Very good movie overall, highly recommended. Most of the negative reviews don't have any merit and are all pollitically based. Give this movie a chance at least, and it might give you a different perspective.

Caught this film on TV the other night, since I'd never heard of it and the description looked interesting. It was released by UA so I thought it would be entertaining, since a major film company has some standards. Pete is a misfit who wears exactly the same facial expression throughout the entire film, while Rikki is an improbable combination of singer and geologist, the latter part of which comes in unusually handy halfway through the film. They drive into the outback in mom's old car and somehow become rich while Pete invents stuff and then his mates try to break him out of jail. It's as dull and uneven as it sounds. The songs are just okay. There is an attempt to liven things up with quirky characters but they never go anywhere. The great Bill Hunter is the only saving grace, at turns exasperated or scheming, and in the film's only truly hilarious scene, is driven to madness by a non-stop proselytizer as he angrily joins him in singing hymns. He looks like he's going to snap any second.

Tracing paper thin plot, WEAK conflict and so much forced quirkiness that it'll make your head ache! The characters are all unbelievable and SUPER cliché. And its about a brother and sister...there are many moments where there would be sexual tension and excitement in their conversations if they weren't brother and sister, even if they weren't love interests. But its a brother and sister...and they're not even interesting. The guy Pete makes weird machines and acts as quirky as he can, but it's all forced, trite and poorly executed. There are several scenes where the filmmakers have Pete do something quirky and crazy but its unrealistic enough to seem stupid and forced in there, for example at one point he's driving a car and his sister is asleep next to him (awesome, HIS SISTER, right guys, she's coming along for the trip yah! A crazy "ZANY" trip with his...sister...) anyway he climbs out onto the roof of the car after tying leather straps to the steering wheel and steers from the roof. I don't know how he was accelerating and braking, but screw it right! Its quirky and zany! So many other ridiculous scenes like that, but it's worse because there is terrible dialogue supporting a terrible "story."

I wanted to see this movie to see what the cop cars looked like in the eighties (it was a long time ago and I can't remember a VL commodore as the standard cop car). Anyway, I felt quite jipped when the cop cars were VB Commodores and had YELLOW lights. They are not real cop cars (though the cops probably did drive VB Commodores when then were first being built). That doesn't matter because obviously this is a low budget movie and one can't expect everything.It wasn't a good movie though - there seemed to be a lack of a plot, and once they had fled the city after causing enormous problems for a certain nasty police sergeant, the movie lacked direction. They began mining, which is difficult in Australia because one does not own the minerals under the ground, the government does, and one cannot simply start mining them. The movie simply seemed to be glued together and there was little joining the scenes together. The end of the movie was completely illogical as well, because Ricky becomes a builder, or is it that she is mining in the middle of Melbourne - it is difficult to work out.Pete is an inventor, though this is done fairly well, the movie simply seems to be an excuse to show some weird inventions, and not many of them exist in the movie either - at least Malcolm had a plot (from what I can remember). One might argue that we should support Australian film - I will as long as they are not like this movie.The plot is very difficult to make out - a sergeant injured Ricky and Pete's mother and Pete becomes Evil Donald in a quest of vengeance against this police officer. He causes one too many problems and they flee the city to make a new life in the country. It begins as a road movie, but then settle down in a town (no idea what the town is, but it probably is Mount Isa) and begin mining after ripping off a major mine. They then sell the mine, make heaps of money, and get the police officer in lots of trouble, reconcile with their parents (though this is not resolved, simply the police laugh at the pompous old father) and then have a happy ending - nothing directing them to the end, simply an unconnected series of events culminating in a pathetic ending where everybody is happy. Not exactly a movie that is worth wasting one's time to see.

Nothing much happens in Rikki and Pete, but this is not really a criticism. It's a character comedy and the time spent with the titular oddball brother and sister pair is not time wasted. Rikki is a bored researcher who wants to be a country music star and tries a few wacky stunts to get her second career going. Pete is a rather anti-social, housebound type with a real genius for creating fascinatingly useless, Rube Goldberg style devices. Watching these weird toys work is one of the genuine pleasures of this little movie. The style is intimate, with a lot of close shots of one of both of the sibs, and the setting is effectively littered and cluttered, as any world would be that had a mad little builder like Pete in it. There are few bright colors and no big message here as their odd little story lines play out, just a quite appealing portrait of a functional sibling relationship in a somewhat dysfunctional and frustrating life situation. Worth a look.