Most critics find Romper Stomper a hard film to admire. The reviews agree that Geoffrey Wright’s portrait of Melbourne skinheads has real force: the violence is staged with speed and conviction, and Russell Crowe’s Hando is singled out again and again as the reason to watch, a performance of flat, unreflective menace that at least one reviewer ranks as his most frightening. Where the film earns praise, it is for energy and for Crowe, not for thought.
The reservations cluster around exactly that energy. Most critics feel the film gets carried along by the mayhem it means to condemn, leaving its moral position unclear and its closing message thin. Variety calls it a Clockwork Orange without the intellect; the Los Angeles Times finds the violence numbing and without a point. The spread is wide: the Guardian and, much later, Collider defend it as uncompromising, but five of the seven reviews land negative.