Chopper (2000)

There are certain true crime figures who seem almost too large for real life, the kind of people whose own exaggerations and self-mythologising make them practically impossible to dramatise without the whole thing tipping over into parody. Mark "Chopper" Read, the Melbourne criminal who became something of an unlikely celebrity in Australia through his best-selling memoirs, is exactly that sort of subject. Born in 1954, Read accumulated a record that included multiple stabbings, shootings and a stint in Pentridge Prison where he famously had a fellow inmate remove most of his ears to secure a transfer. He also wrote about it all with gleeful irreverence, turning himself into a folk anti-hero before his death in 2013. The film's own tagline, "Never let the truth get in the way of a good yarn", is practically a philosophy statement on the man himself.

Chopper (2000) was the feature debut of Australian director Andrew Dominik, produced through Mushroom Pictures alongside the Australian Film Finance Corporation and Pariah Films. Dominik had worked in Australian television and advertising before turning to this project, and the film announced him immediately as a director with a confident, unsettling grip on tone. The 94-minute runtime is lean and deliberate, never padding things out for the sake of appearances. The script draws on Read's own memoirs as source material, which gives it an odd quality: this is a story partly shaped by the very man at its centre, a man with every reason to cast himself in a particular light. That ambiguity is baked into the fabric of the whole production. For further Australian cinema on the site, it is worth checking out the review of You Won't Be Alone (2022), another film that approaches violence and identity through a distinctly unnerving lens.

The film rests almost entirely on Eric Bana, then best known in Australia as a comedian and television performer, in a transformation that genuinely surprised audiences and critics at the time. Physically and psychologically, Bana disappears into Read with a commitment that is both persuasive and, at times, genuinely unsettling. The supporting cast includes Vince Colosimo, Simon Lyndon, David Field and Dan Wyllie, all of them doing solid, grounded work in a film that could easily have become a one-man show. Bana would go on to international work in the years that followed, including the kind of ensemble action fare you can read about in the review of Black Hawk Down (2001), though few performances in his career carry quite the same raw charge as this one. For another point of comparison from the crime genre on this site, there is also the review of The Raid 2 (2014), a very different beast in terms of style and setting but equally serious about the mechanics and consequences of violence.

A-Z World Movie Tour Australia Who else but the notorious Chopper Read? Never let the truth get in the way of a good yarn. What a fantastic film. Eric Bana did a perfect job of portraying Chopper Read. It's probably up there for the best Australian movie ever made with Mad Max 2. It's funny in a dark way and the pacing was absolutely spot on.

The comparison to Mad Max 2 is not one I throw around lightly, and I stand by it here. What strikes me most, coming back to this one, is how the film earns its dark humour rather than simply deploying it as a distancing mechanism. You laugh, and then you feel slightly odd about the fact that you laughed, and that tension is precisely the point. Bana's Read is monstrous and ridiculous and somehow, against all better judgement, watchable in a way that very few screen villains manage. Dominik clearly understood that the best approach was to present everything with a straight face and let the audience do the uncomfortable work of deciding how to respond. It is a film that stays with you, and not always comfortably. Sometimes that is exactly what cinema should do.

Rating: ★★★★½  | Year: 2000  | Watched: 2025-05-25

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Trailer

▶ Watch the official trailer for Chopper (2000) on YouTube

Where to watch

Watch in the UK
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Related on Movies With Macca

More with Eric Bana: Black Hawk Down (2001)
More from Australia: Ocean with David Attenborough (2025) · Street Fighter (1994) · We Bury the Dead (2024) · Bluey at the Cinema: Playdates with Friends (2026)
More from the 2000s: Kirikou and the Wild Beasts (2005) · Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (2004) · Daredevil (2003) · Apocalypto (2006)
More crime: A Better Tomorrow (1986) · Angst (1983) · Stolen Face (1952) · Cairo Station (1958)
More drama: Viy (1967) · Wonder (2017) · A Better Tomorrow (1986) · Beautiful Boy (2018)