1882: The Stolen: Full Review
June 21, 2019
By AHNZ
A movie so bad, I’ve already reviewed it once and am back for more!
‘The Stolen’ (2017) takes us on a New Zealand road trip from Marlborough to the West Coast gold fields. On set, Alice Eve (gratuitous underwear girl from Star Trek) says the film is set in 1869, although the official website alternates from “1860s” to “1870s”. The film itself opens telling is it’s “Summer 1882”. What?
That was a hint that the UK film makers don’t care much for New Zealand history! By 1882 the gold rush was well done and the scores of ‘tent towns’ like the film’s fictional “Gold Town” had become ghosts. Director Niall Johnson doesn’t seem to know or care about telling the story right, just shepherding the production. Along with the writer (ex-pat Kiwi in UK, Emily Corcoran, whose baby this film is) the director passively hopes! She hopes the director edits the film well, it’s out of her hands. He hopes the marketing people get in behind (they didn’t,) it’s out of his hands.¹
With poor results.
Alice Eve must be having trouble getting work to take this role. Graham McTavish (Outlander) saves face by keeping his part brief but the film benefits greatly from his talent while it lasts. Richard O’Brien reprises his bad guy’s henchman role as Riff Raff from Rocky Horror Show but instead of being from another dimension his character barely gets two.
Eve, as Charlotte, is slacking around the estate while her husband and some extras pretend to do yard work (no farming?) He tries to prepare his wife for the dangerous life “out here,” yet will “take in strays,” “anyone who will work an honest day.”
Into that plot hole contradiction walks the villain who, after his ‘honest day’ casing the joint, robs and kills and kidnaps Charlotte’s money, husband, and son (in that order.)
Typical left-wing crap now. The villain uses the loot as start-up capital to found Gold Town at the West Coast diggings. He’s got it well under construction too, miniature main street scale model and all, when Charlotte arrives in town as one of the whores for his hotel. Despite having the wealthy goldminer’s market cornered, Bad Capitalist Villain seeks to raise more venture capital by ransoming Charlotte’s baby to her. After all, he says, Britain lied to him about how great NZ was and that’s why he failed at farming and his own family died. Charlotte’s husband was “just lucky” with his farm and a show-off lording it over his workers (like Villain himself in his pub) so Charlotte deserved to be robbed and widowed and now ransomed!
Yes, really, that’s the insane cartoon motive behind this movie. How socialist do you have to be to write this crud? Anyhow, instead of paying the ransom, Charlotte sets out herself to go all Clint Eastwood on Mr Burns’s ass- or so we hope.
That doesn’t happen. No ‘Kill Bill’ or ‘Atomic Blonde’, just incapable Charlotte who can’t even protect her shoes. McTavish, Stan Walker, and Stig all extend a patriarchal wing of protection to save her from doom- 2/3 of these die in the process. Eventually, Charlotte finds a weapon in her body so while Villain’s limbic brain floods with oxytocin she clocks his skull and runs away with her baby.
Quick interlude: Whore #3/scriptwriter (Emily Corcoran) rescues Charlotte (ex machina as hell…) from the henchman with the fake and totally unnecessary American accent…
Final scene now, Villain catches Charlotte dead to rights- gunpoint- and observes that ‘this is not her world, she ‘needs protecting’. Now, everything from scene one to the fresh Maori corpse in the surf behind her proves his every word totally true. Men and women, mothers and fathers, are essential to each other in partnership. Yet somehow the writer makes Villain pervert this into some demand of female submission.
“Come on,” he says as if calling a dog. Same thing earlier with “needs more milk,” in his tea being supposedly equivalent to the “cook the man some $#!@ eggs!” bit in Once Were Warriors. But this formulation is nonsense. Or does the audience need to dial up their Toxic Masculinity Radar to 11 to be able to appreciate how mean he was being?
Bam, flash! Out of nowhere Charlotte reacts to the nonsense with more fantasy nonsense. She’s dressed as a man now and swiftly disarms Villain with her unlearned Jedi Rey skills, then blows him away with a shot in the head. The present answer to the fantasy of ‘Patriarchy’ is the violent fantasy of female superior martial force.
So much for morals and plot! What did we learn about history?
1. Ferrymead is a fair estimate of Marlborough’s trainlines during the gold rush
Untrue, they had nothing of the sort.
2. Constable Keown and the New Zealand Police didn’t try very hard to find murderers of their leading citizens
Doesn’t suit the plots but actually our police were up and running strong before and during the gold rush, chasing down James Mckenzie for instance.
3. New Zealanders were ‘wild west’ and blase about murder and corpses.
Not at all. Writer been watching too much American Westerns and hoping a good cinematographer can make her look like Eleanor Catton when she’s not.
4. The Bank of New Zealand existed during the period
Absolutely true
5. It’s a 2 week trip from ‘civilisation’ in Marlborough to ‘Gold Town’
Sounds very excessive. Villain could get to Hokitika easily enough so why not ship your prostitutes with Cobb & Co who were well up and running by then? Half a week from Christchurch is enough but I guess the plot needed more bonding time.
6. ‘Maori from the north’ killed Stan Walker’s family, the whole village
If he means the Musket Wars, that was 60 years ago so Stan is too young here to have lost his wife or even for this to have been his parents and he sharing a boy’s memory. But what else could he be referring to?
7. Like some kinda American cop movie, everyone with information or help Charlotte needs wants cash before they give it. £10 to tell her where in the bar McTavish is sitting, buy some Chinese vegetables first and I’ll tell you if there are any babies around here…
Totally implausible! It’s like Eddie Murphy getting the Beverly Hills Cops to fork over cash to informants to follow the trail to the Villain’s den! But Colonial Kiwis were not like that at all, they helped each other out, pointed the way. Haven’t these guys seen The New Adventures of Black Beauty (1990)?
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Previous post: 1882: The Stolen: A Brief Review
1 All this ‘I hope,’ ‘I hope’ stuff comes from behind-the-scenes interviews where the makers say just that
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