Down Under is a clunky and repetitive black comedy, prone to carefully-spaced mood swings that take a baseball bat to any goodwill you may be feeling on the odd occasion. Picture: Supplied.

Director: Abe Forsythe (Ned)

Starring: Lincoln Younes, Rahel Romahn, Alexander England, Damon Herriman, Harriet Dyer.

Rating: **

The only way is up, but which way is it?

The first few minutes of the new Australian production Down Under are guaranteed to have you sitting up and paying full attention.

A stunning barrage of disconcerting on-the-spot footage transports the audience back to the Cronulla riots of December 2005. Picture: Supplied.Source:Supplied

A stunning barrage of disconcerting on-the-spot footage transports the audience back to the Cronulla riots of December 2005, a still-significant flashpoint in modern Australian race relations.

It is an aggressively effective way to set the scene for a movie — that vision is still unsettling over a decade later — and gets you thinking you could be in for something truly special here.

However, after drawing serious thematic heat from its arresting opening, Down Under loses temperature slowly, frustratingly and wastefully.

What follows is a clunky and repetitive black comedy, prone to carefully-spaced mood swings that take a baseball bat to any goodwill you may be feeling on the odd occasion.

Uneven plotting covers a day and night shortly after the riots, where two carloads of ethnically-opposed bogans (one stacked with mixed-up Middle Eastern types, the other crammed with Cro-Magnon Australians) are on a risible collision course.

Down Under loses temperature slowly, frustratingly and wastefully. Picture: Supplied.Source:Supplied

While a recognisable and engaging connection does develop quite quickly between the featured cast of relative unknowns, their best efforts are often undercut by dire, ear-burning dialogue. (There is only one-eighth the swearing of Sausage Party, but soon as the Down Under boys start talking blue, you just wish they’d zip it.)

A big opportunity to say something — heck, anything, really — about how hearts keep hardening despite our “melting pot” of a multicultural society has been missed here.

That early heat dissipates into nothing but inarticulately exhaled hot air.