Metal Skin/Blue Murder is a one-two action pack from Australia that delves into social injustice, criminals, and bad cops. And there’s a lot of cold-blooded violence as well. Neither of the films are for the faint of heart, and if you’re looking for redeeming characters, you’d have to be awfully generous to pick one out of the bunch offered here.

With the subject matter and the geography involved, the movies didn’t have much to offer outside of Australia. The story in Metal Skin is set in Melbourne, and even after watching it I didn’t connect a whole lot to what life was like there in 1994 when the film was made. The film centers on four teens who aren’t exactly enchanted with their lot in life. If I’d been them, I wouldn’t have been either. But none of them really pulled me in and made me want to understand them. In fact, the deeper I got into the movie, the more I wanted to hold them at arm’s length.

Geoffrey Wright was the writer/director of the film, though others evidently directed some of the sequences according to interviews. Wright also delivered Romper Stomper which catapulted Russell Crowe to international attention.

Joe (Aden Young) has problems with his father, and those aren’t played off well enough to make him a sympathetic character by any means. Savina (Tara Morice) just comes across as weird, and the witchcraft thing seems to appear from left field. Dazey (Ben Mendelsohn) is the guy everything comes easy for. And there's Roslyn (Nadine Garner) who, on the surface, has a good life.

Some of the reviews I’ve read have suggested there were a lot of Arthurian undertones to the movie, such as the search for the Holy Grail, which was supposed to be the fastest car in the city so they could win street races. And even the title is supposed to be from a quote by Lancelot in John Boorman’s Excaliber when Lancelot tells Arthur he gave up everything outside of his metal skin to serve.

I just didn’t see those things, and the movie is depressing. There’s a lot of truth in it, because there are disaffected teens everywhere who have the same things on their minds. Some of the action sequences were well shot, particularly the racing bits.

But overall the film left me wanting more story and more happiness. That wasn’t the intent, of course. And maybe that was part of what Wright was going for. However, he obviously knows how to please his hometown audience because the film won two Australian Academy Awards.