australia

According to Google Maps, driving from Darwin, Australia, where Baz Luhrmann's latest work is set, to Sydney takes one day and 23 hours. Coincidentally, that is about how long Australia feels.

Native Aussie Nicole Kidman takes on a British accent in this visually engaging but seemingly unending film, playing the aristocrat Lady Sarah Ashley. She arrives in northern Australia to find her husband killed and their property threatened by the local cattle baron. With the brooding cowboy Drover (Hugh Jackman) and the adorable half-white, half-aborigine Nullah, the story's narrator (Brandon Walters), she sets off to drive her cattle to the port town of Darwin to save her land. Oh-and as if a cattle drive, Hugh Jackman's chiseled abdomen and racial politics of 1942 Australia weren't enough, Japan has just bombed Darwin on the heels of Pearl Harbor.

The shots of Australia's rugged red canyons and cliffs are stunning, and Kidman and Jackman skillfully play out their generic roles. But Australia's trouble is that it tries to be too many movies at once. It's a Western, a war epic, a love story and a poignant study of Australia's aborigine assimilation policy-but it succeeds at none of these things.

Genre-bending is fine, but Luhrmann seems to be creating wholly separate movies. When the grueling cattle drive reaches its conclusion, we assume the movie will tie up loose ends and conclude; there is no such relief. The Western section is followed by Drover and Sarah's love story, then the bombing of Darwin and the leading pair's struggle to retrieve Nullah from a mixed-race orphanage. It's Lonesome Dove meets Pearl Harbor meets Walkabout-and the result, though aesthetically beautiful and entertaining enough, is underwhelming.