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"FacebookPinterest\n\nMy ex used to be a movie critic herself before finding more happiness scribbling erotic romances and crafting artisanal soaps. Can you blame her? Even so, I like to keep the former Dolores Haze posted on the latest squiggles of creative graffiti in movieland. When I told her that the Twilight franchise&amp;#39;s former one-man facial-cream outlet is the best thing in Aussie director David Michod&amp;#39;s otherwise lugubrious new road flick, The Rover, she blinked like a startled meerkat: &amp;quot;Are you saying Robert Pattinson can act?&amp;quot;\n\nThere&amp;#39;s no point in overselling this jazz, so I hedged: &amp;quot;Well, he really wants to.&amp;quot; Whether that&amp;#39;s a worthwhile endeavor is up to you, but there&amp;#39;s no question Pattinson is trying\u2014not only playing second lead to Guy Pearce, who&amp;#39;d probably earn more as his butler, but letting himself get all banged up and grungy in a way sure to dismay teen America&amp;#39;s dewy-eyed hearts. If &amp;quot;He&amp;#39;s only doing this for the indie cred&amp;quot; is the latest all-purpose putdown for such gambits, I frankly couldn&amp;#39;t tell ya why it makes sense as a putdown. What are the Pattinsons of this world supposed to do instead? Wait for someone to urge them to go into politics?\n\n If only he&amp;#39;d picked a less cornball movie to try his hand at acting in. That&amp;#39;s &amp;quot;cornball&amp;quot; in the nouveau-minimalist, Nicolas Winding Refn version of cornball, since The Rover&amp;#39;s dialogue makes your average Easter Island statue seem like a real motormouth and the premise turns My Mother, The Car into the most prescient sitcom title in history. Tooling around in some sort of\u2014but in Australia, how can they tell the difference?\u2014vaguely post-apocalyptic dystopia, the scruffy guy Pearce plays is put-putting down the road to sell off his useless vocal cords or something when his wheels get hijacked by some hooligans on the lam from a shootout. Grimly setting off in pursuit in the hooligans&amp;#39; own vehicle\u2014spot the plot hole there, gang\u2014he comes across a wounded Pattinson, who&amp;#39;s been abandoned at the crime scene by his own callous bro&amp;#39; (Scoot McNairy), and hauls him along as potential barter.\n\n Do these two end up as uneasy allies, you ask? Does Kim Kardashian have one heck of a caboose? Though it&amp;#39;s never clear whether Pattinson&amp;#39;s character is mentally deficient or has just sort of flunked freshman year at the school of hard knocks, that&amp;#39;s not the actor&amp;#39;s fault; in this script, it&amp;#39;s six of one, half a dozen of the other. He and Pearce don&amp;#39;t exactly develop their grudging rapport by swapping their favorite passages from Infinite Jest, if you get my drift.\n\n Along the way, they pull up at a roadside attraction owned by Susan Prior as a gal veterinarian\u2014fit for taking care of animals, get it?\u2014who patches whatever holes Pattinson wasn&amp;#39;t born with. You almost moan with relief when she&amp;#39;s on camera, because even Michod can&amp;#39;t evade the stone truth that members of humanity&amp;#39;s XY-chromosome set often think words are useful ways of communicating one&amp;#39;s needs, concerns, etc., to the latest pair of feral dorks clogging one&amp;#39;s vaguely post-apocalyptic doorstep. But then she gets all overwrought and peevish about the violence our heroes have brought in their wake. (I know, I know: women. Jesus.)\n\n On its own terms, The Rover is well enough crafted. The harsh, primitive\u2014but in Australia, how can they tell the difference?\u2014 landscapes are effectively photographed to emphasize their primitive harshness, and so on. But I did expect better from Michod after his feature debut, 2010&amp;#39;s far superior Animal Kingdom, whose look at the intersections of crime, family ties, and crabbed milieu was a lot fresher than his sophomore flick&amp;#39;s warmed-over notion that terseness + brutalism = existential profundity. Or maybe just, y&amp;#39;know, &amp;quot;pure cinema&amp;quot;\u2014a dummkopf ideal if ever I heard one, since impure cinema is miles more expressive.\n\n Actor Joel Edgerton, who was in Animal Kingdom along with Pearce and Prior, cooked up The Rover&amp;#39;s story along with Michod, which must mean he&amp;#39;d have starred in it if greener pastures hadn&amp;#39;t beckoned. But imagining Edgerton instead of Pearce behind the stubble\u2014in Australia, how can they tell the difference?\u2014is awfully pointless, though it does kill some time now and then. Any chimp with enough Lee Marvin movies under his belt and a couple of driving lessons could play the part. Not to go out on limb here, even Shia LaBeouf might not be totally inadequate.\n\n That leaves Pattinson&amp;#39;s participation as the only source of interest, and you won&amp;#39;t hit the exits thinking badly of him. Granting that he&amp;#39;s gone out of his way to find a part 180 degrees removed from Twilight&amp;#39;s Whatsisname\u2014not quite the case with his waxwork Wall Street privilege psycho in David Cronenberg&amp;#39;s Cosmopolis, even if the actor doubtless hoped otherwise\u2014you can&amp;#39;t fault his commitment. Visibly, Pattinson isn&amp;#39;t just the director&amp;#39;s marionette, either. He&amp;#39;s put in the detail work, wasted or not, and he does hold the screen. That&amp;#39;s why it&amp;#39;ll probably break his heart if other reviewers besides me point out that Twilight\u2014the first installment, anyhow; wild horses couldn&amp;#39;t drag me to the sequels\u2014is a better movie than The Rover. Way better."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.gq.com/story/robert-pattinson-rover-movie>