Tuesday, August 03, 2010

The Hopes & Dreams of Gazza Snell

Gazza is good Kiwi bloke, ambitiously in pursuit of his dreams and hopelessly optimistic to the point of being blind to risk and consequence. A man with a "can do" attitude and boundless energy. Not a good person to be married to if you are the worrying type (or even merely well adjusted). We all know a "Gazza" or two and William McInnes plays him perfectly.

The plot of The Hopes & Dreams of Gazza Snell is very simple, yet it is so dominated by Gazza that only his son Mark gets to share the limelight. Some of the interesting events (like the election campaign or Gail and Ron or Mark and Jee) are handled so abruptly that they seem contrived. I wonder if the story would seem more complete if either more had been made out of them or if they had been cut.

Gazza's passion is go-carting and he lives his passion through his sons and his desire to see them to top of the sport and dreams of Formula 1. He finances his dreams with proceeds of his cleaning business, and what ever schemes he can come up with, to the despair of his wife, Gail (Robyn Malcolm). His risk taking both financially and on the track are leading inevitably to disaster one way or the other only Gazza (and his sons) can't see it.

Overall it a nice simple story with a strong central character that we can all identify with, but the execution of the supporting characters and story elements lets it down a little bit. Still, I have it on good authority that the two boys are eye candy.

Ian's rating 2.5/5
Anne's rating 3/5

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