A climactic shootout with startling strobe-like lighting effects is undeniably impressive. But the jumpy, springy qualities of the movie’s visual style are unfortunately undercut by its verbal content.
Hero or villain, that duality has pretty much come to be a staple of any knowing 21st-century revision of the Western hero, and certainly in anyone as drawn to subversive subtext as Carey. Faithful to the writer's sly vision, Kurzel pries loose the man from both myths and digs deeper to give Kelly an origin story in three parts.
Kelly Gang is stylish and overtly competent and fun to watch and also conformist, conventional enough to make you think that if this were a genuine study of the man, it would be too bad. You’d hope the Ned Kelly of real life—an iconoclast—were a little more interesting.
It’s a pity that in throwing everything at the screen, what the film has to say about its subject, Ned Kelly himself, becomes rather lost in an energised, bustling, yet finally unsatisfying frenzy of activity.
The final image, with Kelly in voiceover presenting himself as both a hero and a victim one last time, again challenges our sympathy for a man who both suffered immensely and was a ruthless criminal.