Review: Last Cab to Darwin, starring Michael Caton, warms the heart

REVIEW: LAST Cab to Darwin is a tough-skinned, yet tender-hearted tale of a bush taxi driver staring his own demise square in the eye.

Last Cab To Darwin (M)

Director: Jeremy Sims (Last Train To Freo)

Starring: Michael Caton, Jacki Weaver, Ningali Lawford-Wolf, Mark Coles Smith, Emma Hamilton

Rating: ***1/2

A final ride that will give you quite a lift

There can be no better reason to go and get yourself a life than learning you are about to die.

That is the sincerely deep and meaningful takeaway from Last Cab To Darwin, a tough-skinned, yet tender-hearted tale of a bush taxi driver staring his own demise square in the eye.

Veteran cabbie Rex Macrae (Michael Caton) has been around the block, and then some. But only in his lifelong hometown of Broken Hill.

The days on the road and the nights down the pub have always been the same. And that’s just the way Rex likes it.

Gold ... Michael Caton gives another superb perfomance.

Sure, his house could do with some repairs. So too could his unacknowledged closeness to Polly (Ningali Lawford-Wolf), the feisty indigenous woman who lives across the street.

So by and large, Rex and the world have been on pretty good terms. But now Rex knows that time is running out fast. That stomach cancer scare he had a while back has returned, and it won’t be going away.

Rex and the world will soon be parting company. Not known for his patience at the best of times, Rex wouldn’t mind getting the whole last-goodbye thing out of the way quick.

He’s heard there might be a loophole opening up in the NT that will give him legal access to a medically-supervised euthanasia machine.

Aussie flick ... Emma Hamilton in Last Cab to Darwin.

So Rex gets on the phone and tells the doctor (Jacki Weaver) planning to trial the controversial apparatus that he is on his way to be her first client.

Then Rex jumps in his cab and sets off on the 2000km road trip north. Becoming all sentimental just isn’t Rex’s style. Nevertheless, a few of the characters he meets en route to his expiry date gets him thinking about putting a few things right that he might have gotten wrong.

Though running a mite too long for the simple and genuinely affecting tale it has to tell, Last Cab To Darwin still forges a strong connection with those receptive to its rustic, no-bulldust demeanour.

A superb anchoring performance from Michael Caton — who is destined to be remembered for this flawless portrayal just as much as his iconic work in The Castle — is a powerful trump card director Jeremy Sims is able to repeatedly play at will.

Equally impacting in her handful of scenes is Lawford-Wolf, whose character holds the key to humanising Rex when he might have come off as a knockabout Aussie cliche.

Originally published as Review: Last Cab to Darwin, starring Michael Caton, warms the heart