Love in the Outback. With bombs.

Baz Luhrman is a romantic goofball. As co-writer and director of Australia, he has created a comedy, and a drama, and an adventure and a cowboy movie and a World War II picture. It’s not so much that he can’t decide which direction to go, but that he likes all the directions so he figures he might as well go everywhere. Nicole Kidman plays Sarah Ashley, an uptight English noblewoman whose husband has settled down on a remote cattle ranch in the Australian Outback. She boldly travels there to retrieve him, but when she arrives she learns that he has been murdered and she has become the reluctant owner of a cattle spread that directly threatens the empire of nefarious rancher King Carney (Bryan Brown). Her only reliable ally in the outback is a hunky Australian cowboy played by Hugh Jackman (they call him “The Drover” – apparently he’s too cool for a regular name); they hate each other on sight, so of course they fall in love after about half an hour. What follows is a glorious, dusty widescreen cattle drive framed by elaborate Australian vistas, then a lot of romance in the rain, and then the Japanese come and bomb everything. The best part of the movie is a little boy named Nullah, offspring of a white father and Aborigine mother; played by Brandon Walters, he steals Lady Ashley’s heart and pretty much every scene. This isn’t serious filmmaking, although at times it seems like it would like to be, but it is an entertaining film, particularly if you’re in a sweeping epic kind of mood. Playing in a whole lot of theaters all over the place. Not raking it in; stumbling badly against Four Christmases, Bolt and Twilight. Critical reviews dead average.