Australia is an epic love story, and a quite extraordinary piece of kitsch. Everything about the film is wildly over the top. The fizzing romance between a frigid English aristocrat (Nicole Kidman) and a tough-as-nails drover (Hugh Jackman) makes Gone With the Wind look like a gentle breeze. The all-or-nothing gamble to race 1,500 cattle across the Outback with a crew of children and drunks has the hair-raising logic of an Indiana Jones travelogue.

No one in their right mind would describe Baz Luhrmann's adventure as great art. It's fabulous popcorn: a vintage, life-affirming weepy that begs you to turn off your brain and ogle at the spectacular views. Kidman is the pale and pukka beauty Lady Sarah Ashley, who inherits a cattle station in a godforsaken outpost in the Northern Territory when her philandering husband is murdered. Jackman is her immaculately buffed saviour who is in tune with the land, but loath to surrender his heart. Once you've swallowed the bait it's utterly pointless to resist.

There are plots by contemptuous tyrants to bully Kidman on to the next ship home. Meddling cops try to abduct her enchanting half-caste orphan, Nullah (Brandon Walters), whom Lady Sarah is desperate to adopt. But Luhrmann's 1940s fantasy has precious little grip on historical realities; particularly a scandal as serious and troubling as the Stolen Generation, where thousands of mixed-race children were rounded up and mailed to far-flung missions until the practice was abandoned in 1974.

In this sensitive respect, Australia has the cutting edge of a frothy West End musical. Luhrmann has cheekily talked up the period credibility and pain of his picture but it would be like claiming that James Cameron's Titanic is a blow-by-blow account of the actual sinking. The Japanese blitz of Darwin that Luhrmann paints in Australia - complete with lowering, moody skies - is every bit as melodramatic as Michael Bay's attack on Pearl Harbor (2001). It bears as much relation to truth as the magic performed by the 11-year-old Nullah to stop a herd of stampeding cattle from charging over a cliff.

It's addictive nonsense. The power-hungry crooks are hatched out of the same Victorian mould as Bill Sykes. Bryan Brown is a cackling beef baron, and Kidman's greatest rival. David Wenham is his grizzled, murderous sidekick.

These are the blackguards that Jackman's hunky drover, called Drover, originally enough, must keep away from his reluctant new lover. He doesn't do a particularly good job of it. As the melodrama continually reminds us, Drover would rather be out galloping along in slow-motion beside a thundering river of wild stallions. What these animals are doing in the middle of the unforgiving Northern Territory is never actually explained.

This is blood-boiling stuff if you're a stickler for detail. The generous liberties that Luhrmann takes with the history books and the indigenous culture - the noble Aborigines, the racist pioneers - have infuriated Australians as much as they delight us. The maverick director is a shameless magpie. He has a gift for plucking odds and sods from the great panoply of Hollywood chintz. His most memorable films - Romeo + Juliet and Moulin Rouge! - are immaculately assembled pastiches.

Australia is no different. One of the running themes of the film is a tongue-in-cheek homage to Victor Fleming's classic The Wizard of Oz (or Aus). When the pie-eyed waif, Nullah, is swept away screaming and kicking to a mission station on an island off the coast of Darwin, the boy promises to “sing” his way back to Kidman's distraught Lady Ashley. The song? Over the Rainbow.

12A, 165 minutes

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