Review: 1%

Bikies! They're topical, they're scary, they're misunderstood and up to no good: it's a wonder we haven't seen more Australian movies about them. Then again, maybe people watched that mini-series Bikie Wars: Brothers in Arms from a few years back, because if anything could make bikies look dull, that did it. 1% doesn't exactly forge a new path for the Bikie genre, but it doesn't have to: sometimes a good story well told is enough.

For the last few years Perth bikie club The Copperheads has been run by the relatively thoughtful Paddo (Ryan Corr). He’s got big plans for the club, looking towards a future based on working together with their rival gangs to reap the rewards of organised crime. Two things stand in his way; one is his brother Skink (Josh McConville), whose bungled attempt to move into drug dealing forces Paddo to make a deal with enemy Sugar (Aaron Petersen). The other is Knuck (Matt Nable, who also wrote the script), original leader of The Copperheads. He’s fresh out of jail and keen to take the club back to the old, violent ways he knows best. 

It’s the kind of story that could easily have turned into another gang war saga (and rest assured, there's a bunch of bikie-on-bikie crime taking place here), but first-time feature director Stephen McCallum takes an almost Shakespearian approach to the material, with the rival  leaders more about scheming against each other as they’re egged on by their respective partners (Abbey Lee as Paddo’s ambitious girlfriend and Simone Kessell as Knuck’s regal consort) than whipping each other with bike chains. 

It’s not quite up there with the classics of Australian crime cinema (or bikie cinema: Stone is a very high mountain to climb), and a few of the characters are a little misjudged: for one, Skink takes a little too long to shift from an annoying plot device to a real character. But a gritty atmosphere and a few decent plot twists (plus an ambivalent approach to the bikies themselves) gives this enough of an edge to keep this fast-moving film consistently entertaining.

- Anthony Morris