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Movies & TV Movies & TV Reviews

Griff The Invisible

GRIFF THE INVISIBLE (Leon Ford). 90 minutes. Opens Friday (August 19). For venues and times, see Movies. Rating: NNN


GRIFF THE INVISIBLE (Leon Ford). 90 minutes. Opens Friday (August 19). For venues and times, see Movies.

Griff The Invisible is the latest entry in the “ordinary superhero” wave that also includes Defendor and Super, in which a regular guy puts on a suit to fight crime and escape his miserable life.

Leon Ford’s odd little movie is set in Sydney, where the withdrawn Griff (Ryan Kwanten) spends his days in a nondescript office job and his nights patrolling his neighbourhood and working on perfecting his invisibility suit. Griff’s endeavours get an unexpected boost when his brother (Patrick Brammall) introduces his new girlfriend (Maeve Dermody), who’s obsessed with passing her body through solid matter.

Ford flirts with tweeness in his beautiful-dreamer whimsy, and the indie rock score doesn’t help. The pic also stumbles in the middle, when our sympathies are supposed to shift from one character to another and they don’t. But the actors hold things together, burrowing deeply into their agonizingly awkward characters.

Fans of Kwanten’s often shirtless swaggering on True Blood will struggle to find any trace of Jason Stackhouse in the shrugging, stammering Griff, and Dermody matches his wide-open vulnerability as the starry-eyed Melody. Whether you buy the things these people do probably depends on your tolerance for adorable psychotic breaks.NORMAN WILNER

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