1. Children
Every other scene the film would assume a different personality. Humor, bank robberies, shootouts, special effects, and romance all tangled in one movie.
The chase is fast, often very funny and strewn with oddballs, like an accordion player who favors Wagner (hilarious wheelchair character), and a grim Miss Kitty who throws drinks at bar patrons who won't say "please." The sweet and tough Midori, played by Youki Kudoh, and Colin, aka Russell Crowe, are a winning pair - star-crossed lovers of the old-movie school of romance, who even do a turn on the dance floor in tux and ball gown. The jilted Yukio (Kenji Isomura) wonderfully transforms himself from office drone to avenging, leather-clad road warrior. He is still bound, however, by tradition; the shame of being "the most publicized cuckold in Japan" fuels his wrath. Its all about transformations. And these transformations are not what you would expect from the beginning of the film (just watching a minute into the film, who would know it would change and go such a completely other direction. Not what you expect at all).
Although Lahiff is in love with with the film noir genre, this film doesn't fit into that category. In fact, he can't even figure out what genre this fits into, suggesting "a black comedy may be the closest match." What is important is there's something about Australia that cannot be categorized, in much the same way there's something about the country that makes people go screaming through the desert.
"What I personally like about Heaven's Burning, as it stands now," says Australian director Craig Lahiff, "is how it often takes audiences a while to catch on to the fact that what they're watching is actually meant to be fun. That's because we deliberately went through and took out all the usual cues other movies throw in to tell people if a scene is going to be comic, or sexy, or scary, or what, which means they're never quite sure when.