20 Underrated Movies From 2000 You've Probably Never Seen
13. Chopper
Released: 3rd August 2000 (Australia)
The debut feature for The Assassination Of Jesse James director Andrew Dominik focused on another big true-life criminal character, in this case a contemporary one from Dominik's native Australia.
Mark "Chopper" Read, a repeat violent offender, made a name for himself with a series of prison-penned autobiographical books about his wild exploits both in and out of prison. Dominik's film adapts these to tell a story that jumps back and forth between Chopper's sterile prison existence and the lurid and violent life of crime he led outside.
Read himself picked out sketch show comedian Eric Bana as the slightly leftfield choice to play him. It is Bana, though, that is the real making of the movie. Magnetic, engaging, funny, terrifying, and grotesque, Bana makes Chopper into a wildly unpredictable figure, a cocksure charmer one moment, a menacing monster the next.
Bana was so good, in fact, that not only did the performance land him a move to Hollywood to play the title role in Hulk and Hector in Troy, it also made people forget he ever was a comedian, leaving him stuck in a series of dark and serious dramatic movies.