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Herald rating: ***

Review: Graham Reid

On the streets of multicultural Melbourne, Steve (Giannopoulos) is the son of Greek parents but is neither Greek nor accepted as Australian.

So on the number plate of his Valiant he flaunts the identity he has been given: WOG BOY.

Street-sassy Steve - enjoying life on the dole, and of inestimable mateship support to any number of similar friends - isn't so much unemployed as between jobs. But when the cherished Valiant nudges the limo of Employment Minister Raelene Beagle-Thorpe (Geraldine Turner) the scene is set for him to be nailed on television as Australia's biggest dole bludger, in a brilliantly funny turn by real-life tele-muckraker Derryn Hinch.

Being smitten with the minister's assistant (Bell), having a wideboy mate (Colosimo as the preening Frank) who has the hots for her sister (Abi Tucker), and having a friend cooking up substances, means that Steve's enjoyable existence is progressively torn apart as he becomes embroiled in an increasingly complex, and sometimes very funny, web of political deceit and sexual longing.

An extension of Giannopoulos' stage plays Wogs Out of Work, Wog-a-Rama and Wog Boys, the best humour here happens in the margins: the incidental characters are hilarious and offer snappy observations of their own cultures and the great Australian morass, and there are subtle touches as immigrants of many backgrounds (Vietnamese, Italian) grapple with their not-quite-Oz identities. The film shows a keen eye for the details and detritus of various cultures, with some amusingly droll one-liners - "Ambition is just not having the guts to be lazy" - thrown in along the way.

Writer and central character Giannopoulos brings some astute observations about identity, unemployment and questions of culture into a movie which on the surface is simply a heretical romp through social convention, political expediency and scamming the dole.

Unfortunately the central characters exist as little more than caricatures (Turner's is drawn in crayon, Bell's is little more than decorative) and there is a numb inevitability about the ending.

The Wog Boy perhaps speaks more to Australians than it does to this less multicultural melting pot, but that shouldn't stop you taking in a film which is highly enjoyable yet delivers interesting messages of identity in the subtext.