Not only looks like a hammerhead shark but acts like one,” said the tabloids of Kerry Francis Bullmore Packer, not entirely without basis.
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He does look like one in Howzat: Kerry Packer’s War, the Nine mini-series that concludes tomorrow night. And often acts like one.
Lachy Hulme plays the media baron who poached the world’s best players in 1976 for his World Series Cricket, and if you saw Sunday’s first part you know he’s a big man. By hand-held camera, we sit astride his immense shoulders slicing through corridors and boardrooms.
But Hulme softens Packer’s physicality. The writers know just when to humanise him, tugging us back before we recoil. He bullies people to tears, but also remembers birthdays and shuffles and looks roly-poly.
We pick up during the first World Series match at VFL Park. Packer, his oddly close advisor John Cornell (Abe Forsythe) and the players need it to work. No one comes to watch.
Empty stands are their own special kind of rejection, and each subsequent game where the crickets drown out the cricketers builds pressure on Packer in the boardroom. The tension bubbles out of Packer, from his nostrils and his eyes. Most of it is absorbed by the browbeaten executive Gavin Warner (Craig Hall), who is fictional as far as I know.
Packer’s poisonous treatment of Warner is like a running sore. It’s hard to watch, and to hear. The baron hurls the F-word constantly, and Hulme delivers its ‘‘k’’ sound like a crocodile snapping its jaws.
But Packer bleeds. He gets glassy eyed when his words for the flinty Australian captain Ian Chappell (Clayton Watson) are rejected with a growled ‘‘f--- off’’.
There are allusions to Packer having taken ‘‘punches’’ as a child (it’s unclear whether they’re literal punches) from his father Sir Frank, and he rues having to live with himself.
‘‘It’s not easy,’’ he says, quietly.
This is essentially a biopic set against a vibrant backdrop of semi-fleshed-out cricketer characters and archive footage.
Some players, like Greg Chappell (Damon Gameau) are remarkable likenesses in both looks and body language while others (like Hamish Michael’s chain-smoking Doug Walters) are caricatures.
It’s a blokey story about blokey blokes made by what is, at its core, a blokey network. The women, headed up by Cornell’s wife Delvene Delaney (Cariba Heine), are mostly eye candy.
If you don’t know cricket and wonder why you should care about Howzat, I’d point you to Moneyball, which was about baseball but didn’t require a degree in America’s national pastime to enjoy.
This isn’t as good, but it lights similar fires as a tale of an idea that would revolutionise sport.
As a footnote, cricket lovers will be pleased with the action sequences. These actors actually look like they’ve played the game, and the physics are sound.
We’ve come a long way from the 1984 ABC mini-series Bodyline, about which I heard ABC cricket commentator Kerry O’Keeffe once scoff: ‘‘The fast bowlers are on and the ‘keeper’s up at the stumps.’’
