“Go where your heart tells you to and you won’t go wrong.”
Some stories stick with you not because of how they end, but because of what they stand for. Ned Kelly (2003), starring Heath Ledger, is one of those stories. It’s a film I had to watch in two parts. Not because it dragged or lost pace, but because I knew how the story ended. I chose to take a pause, to build myself up for the grief I knew was coming.
I’d read The True History of the Kelly Gang and seen the more recent adaptation of that novel. But something about this version struck a chord with me. Maybe it was the era I’m in, one where injustice, resistance, and the idea of choosing to live by your own code feel more resonant than ever. Maybe it was Heath Ledger. He didn’t just play Ned Kelly, he gave him depth, vulnerability, rage, and dignity. He made him human. Not just a folk hero or a bushranger, but a son, a brother, a man with a heart full of love and a life shaped by injustice.
This film does well to show the hardship, the betrayal, the harsh weight of a system built to protect power, not people. It doesn’t flinch from the violence but it never loses sight of the fact that Ned Kelly was pushed, provoked, cornered. His defiance wasn’t reckless rebellion. It was a response to oppression. To the abuse of authority. To the idea that some lives are worth less than others.
The final standoff at the end is gutting. The death of Dan Kelly and particularly Steve Hart was poignant to say the least. These weren’t just sidekicks or footnotes in history, they were real people and the film gives them a tragic grace, a sense of lost youth. Their deaths hit like a hammer because, by that point, you care. You understand what they were fighting for, and how impossibly high the stakes had become.
I cried, despite preparing not to. Despite that pause halfway through to brace myself.
Ned Kelly is a hero. Not because he won, but because he refused to bow. His story is a reminder that standing up for who you are, for your family, for your dignity, matters. His life was short, and its end brutal, but his spirit, that uncompromising, defiant spirit, still burns in anyone who resists systems that demand conformity at the cost of freedom.
Watching this film now, in a time when many of us are questioning the structures we live under, feels eerily relevant. It’s a call to remember that we all have the right to live as ourselves, so long as we do no harm, and that sometimes, resistance is the most human thing we can offer.
