Chopper (2000)

On the heels of loving the Jesse James movie, I wanted to see "Chopper" all the more, since Andrew Dominik directed them both. I also have a strong affection for Eric Bana, for some reason, so I had been pushing for us to see "Chopper" for a while. Nick finally agreed after some resistance, since he hadn't liked it very much the last time he saw it.

Although I had no reason to think this, I had this impression that there was a motorcycle in this movie, and since I knew the film was Australian and about prison, I pictured sort of a Mad Max scenario: a convict riding around liberating people from prisons in the outback, shooting people. Lots of blood, I thought. I was right about the last part, but not the motorcycle. No motorcycle was involved.

Bana, who seems both taller and fleshier than he was in "Munich" and "Troy" (please, no laughing), is indeed a convict, who earns the name "Chopper" when he gets another convict to cut off the outside edges of his ears so that he will get sent into the prison hospital. Inside and outside of prison, Chopper leverages his charisma and his willingness to be more violent than everybody else, emerging embattled but yet untouchable (in this way, he's like Jesse James, and we kept noticing similarities between the two movies - yet another piece in the "Australian outback = American West" equation). Eventually, he becomes some sort of a media phenom, with DVDs and books produced about his story (apparently this happened in real life too).

There's a scene where Chopper's ally turns on him and shivs him repeatedly in the chest, while Chopper continues to stand up and look at the friend with reproachful eyes, finally stripping off his shirt so that everyone can see the blood pulsing out of all of his stab wounds. He's like a tree whose bark is being ripped off piece by piece. Or Christ. That's what I'll probably remember from the movie, along with the scene when Chopper pulls his flaccid penis out of his pants in order to impress a lady in a bar who's looking his way. Laughing maniacally, he watches as she tries to suppress her obvious interest, attracted as much by his madness as by the dangling member. Probably not Bana's actual banana. But hey.