good back-story, and good acting

This is a must-see and one of the best documentaries - and films - of this year.

A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

Ray Winstone deserves the "Steven Seagal Gold Star Award for mumbling in a low voice". Absolutely awful... did the director tell Winstone to speak unintelligibly, or was he too chicken to tell him to SPEAK UP and SEPAK CLEARLY? Also in this fil, again we have the dull Brad Pitt playing the part of a violent, vicious IRISH thug. The Irish accent is a broad caricature (I'm part Irish, btw). This flick is so bleak, with ao many long, drawn-out scenes. I simply could not finish it, had to eject the DVD. And thank God for subtitles, or I would not have been able to catch more than 10% of what Winstone slurred. NOT RECOMMENDED. 2/10 because there are some worse flims and because John Hurt lifted this crud a little.

A good ten years have passed since last I saw "The Proposition", and it'll probably be another ten before I watch this again. But knowing how cold and evil this movie is does help you enjoy the more subtle things like character and story. There are some nice performances here (John Hurt was a highlight) and I found myself wishing the story would move away from Guy Pearce and back to Ray Winstone. The story itself is as Western as they come: retribution, justice, misanthropic family. Fairly simplistic. It's not a bad movie, and it does plunge you into the brutal Australian outback where society lives on the raggedy edge.But it is, first and foremost, a nasty affair. The violence runs grisly, and when the blood isn't flying, the sound design picks up the slack and your imagination does the rest.Not my thing.5/10

The only thing in this world that is more slowly paced than this movie is Continental Drift! I kept looking at the clock, kept wondering when it was going pick up speed. It never did. On the box, one of the critics claims this to be a classic in the vein of Peckinpah, Eastwood, Leone. I'm considering suing said critic for "false advertisement" or misrepresentation. I really have nothing else to say about it but they're telling me I've not written enough, hence: this filler. I miss the days of Peckinpah, the time before writers thought it necessary to fill script with "f*ck"s and "GD"s. (BTW: Were/are flies really that bad in Australia?)

THE PROPOSITION has a great premise. An outlaw is captured alongside his younger brother. The Policeman who did it offers him the titular proposition. Find and kill his elder brother- or else the younger brother will be hanged .Sadly despite this excellent premise and an interesting setting - a Western set in the Victorian Australian Outback - the film throws it all away with poor plotting, uninteresting characters, a lack of respect for those it portrays and an over-long running time.The number one problem is that the screenplay becomes far too interested in the Policeman (Ray Winstone) and places his story on par with that of the Outlaw (Guy Pearce). Instantly the story becomes over-long in order to accommodate this second major plot. It doesn't help that, unlike the Outlaw, the Policeman has no real goal to achieve, no stakes, indeed, nothing much to do at all. This also results in a lack of characterisation for the Outlaw. Stripped of dialogue you cannot care about this enigma of a man, whilst the central question of the film - will he kill his elder brother to save his younger brother? - is never sufficiently teased. The film makes a number of other missteps. It asks the audience to sympathise with the elder brother, despite him being a murderer and a rapist (and showing no real remorse for either). It forces modern attitudes on the past, notably in the corporal punishment scene where the (mentally retarded) younger brother is whipped. At the beginning the crowd cheer but by the end they drift away, sickened. Not only does this not make sense (why the change?) but it is also historically dishonest. Victorians were quite happy with corporal punishment. The disgust of the crowd is that of the filmmakers, not that of the historical people. It also continues the tedious trend of self-hating imperial films in which all the white male characters are swine whilst women and natives are wise and sympathetic (the only character I cared about was the almost silent Aborigine tracker- who was promptly murdered).Nick Cave did the music, which all to often means long, slow, unnecessary shots of Australia set to music. Once might have been fine but every time the story starts moving they throw another of these boring musical pauses in. A handful of sub plots, such as John Hurt's character, serve only to eke out more running time. This film should stand as a perfect example of how 'artiness' can ruin a film.