The tough love of fatherhood, taken to violent extremes here, seeks to transmit a strict idea of manhood while teaching hard lessons to fit a hard life. Though the film is bleak in its outlook, its conclusion provides an uplifting truth: that by taking responsibility for our actions, we can both learn from our fathers and disobey them when the time comes, thereby forging our own, independent identity.
The father describes the pair as mongrels, and Last Ride, it can be argued, is indeed first and foremost about identity. The central question here is the clash between what is inherited and was is learned, between the values transmitted from one generation to the next and the experiences which can allow these values to be contradicted.
At work in this deceptively simple film is perhaps a quest to define not just masculinity but Australian identity as a whole: the product of a criminal past and a violent upbringing, the rejection of age-old traditions coupled with a silent yearning for civilization, the constant struggle for social harmony in an inhospitable land
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