YMMV / The Proposition

• Awesome Music: The eerie, moody, dissonant soundtrack.
• Complete Monster:
  • Eden Fletcher is a smug official who hides his appetite for cruelty behind a thin veneer of politesse. With conflicts between the townspeople and the Aboriginal tribes, Fletcher informs Captain Stanley that rather than kill one or two perpetrators, he will simply need to exterminate the tribes completely in a full genocide. Upon the arrest of Mike "Mikey" Burns, brother of notorious criminal Arthur, Fletcher goes back on the deal Stanley made with Mikey's brother Charlie. Despite Mikey's clear mental incapacity, Fletcher sentences him to a hundred brutal lashes with no care of how it will bring the monstrous Arthur's wrath down on the town, ordering the flogging to continue long after the people, even the flogger, have grown disgusted and tired of it.
  • Sergeant Lawrence is a racist brute who eagerly hopes to kill any Aboriginal locals he can. Lawrence establishes his cruelty when he rounds up a group of innocent Aboriginals under the delusion they are "rebels", locks them in dreadful conditions, and violently threatens to kill them one by one to extort information. Spending his free time tormenting the mentally slow Mikey Burns to the point of tears, Lawrence is later personally dispatched to wipe out any nearby Aboriginals. He begins his warpath by slaughtering an entire camp of unsuspecting Aboriginal men, women, and children, and laughs with glee while covered in their blood, anticipating the slaughter of the next settlement he comes across.
• Jerks Are Worse Than Villains: Fletcher is arrogant, corrupt, and cowardly, with no humanizing qualities at all. Even the psychopathic Arthur Burns is given more redeeming qualities, such as his poetic nature and loyalty to his family and friends.
• Moral Event Horizon:
  • Arthur Burns and Sam have many offscreen atrocities under their belts, but they lose the sympathy of narrative and audience alike when they assault Captain Stanley and rape his wife in front of him, while singing hymns.
  • Eden Fletcher crosses it when he has Mikey whipped to death, and continues to scream for blood even as the rest of the town turns away in disgust.
• Nightmare Fuel: Opening credits: a sweet children's choir singing while we see black-and-white images of the Hopkins Massacre's aftermath. One of these is the baby's cradle drenched in blood.
• One-Scene Wonder: Jellon Lamb actually appears in two scenes (the second one quite brief), but he was catalogued back when that trope was called "Cardinal Wolsey". There were reportedly several big name actors who wanted this role over any of the others with much more screentime because it was just that well-written.
• Squick: During the flogging scene, we get a nice shot of the deputy taking a break to squeeze the blood out of the whip like he's wringing out a wet dish rag.
• Tear Jerker: Mikey's death.