UNTIL Skippy and sports stars and Kylie, Australia was low on legends. Ned Kelly, 19th century outlaw of Irish stock, was an early contender, and his story is oft told.

Told badly in the case of Tony Richardson's 1970 action adventure, a risible vanity project for Mick Jagger. While, outwardly, there is no need for another Kelly gang yarn, director Gregor Jordan and an intense lead performance from Heath Ledger soon dispel such thoughts.

Jordan's Buffalo Soldiers is already a contender for the films of the year list, and he continues that hot streak with another anti-establishment movie built on human dilemma, moral ambiguity, a dual perspective on law breaking and the director's gift for action sequences that don't reek of blockbuster clich.

Jordan could have opted for an action movie: he has the handsome lead and support, Ledger and flavour-of-the-year Orlando Bloom; he has the gang, the pretty aristocratic maiden (an under-used Naomi Watts), the sparse scenery, and the shoot-outs. He has the pursuing shadow too in Geoffrey Rush's gaunt policeman. Yet this is no Bonnie And Clyde or Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid with their comic interludes and soft-focus glow.

Jordan's crunch decision is to elect for a grim realism and remorseless destiny in his Australian western. Ledger's anarchic, devious Kelly is no less purposeful; there is real weight to his performance and not only because of his prodigious beard. As with folk heroes in the Robin Hood or Jesse James tradition, Kelly re-distributes the wealth of the rich (the British landowners) to the poor (immigrant farming families, such as Kelly's own), and yet he is a cop killer too.

Here is the moral dilemma, and Jordan does not shy away from it, instead meticulously constructing the equivalent of a social inquiry report on the ferocious Kelly's motives; his sense of injustice in the face of constant harassment of Irish Catholics by English Protestant settlers and the police. Like Clint Eastwood's Western valedictory Unforgiven, Jordan's Ned Kelly is driven by fate.

Updated: 08:48 Friday, September 26, 2003