‘Hunt For The Wilderpeople’ Can Help Us Forget All Our Cinematic Shame

HUNT FOR THE WILDERPEOPLE

If it’s a cliché that every great Kiwi soon gets claimed as an Australian, why haven’t we put Taika Waititi on the $5 note yet? It seems like a terrible, genuinely perplexing oversight in cultural appropriation, especially given he could fill the yawning void that is Inspiring Australian Filmmakers. Sure, maybe Waititi’s films are Kiwi-as-fuck, but what’s a beached-az-ish accent or two when it comes to neighbourly Trans-Tasman exchange?

After the cult/comic/commercial success of 2014’s vampire mockumentary What We Do In The Shadows, Waititi was —like so many True Blue Aussie exports before him— tapped to Go Hollywood; lined up to direct a Hemsworth brother, no less, in the next Thor movie. In between, he made the unabashed “delightful romp” Hunt For The Wilderpeople, freshly-enshrined as the most successful local film in NZ box office history. Given the biggest Australian film of the last 30 years is Baz Luhrmann’s (cultural-) cringe-inducing Australia, surely now’s the time to adopt someone who can forget all our cinematic shame.

Here, Julian Dennison plays an unwanted 13-year-old ward-of-the-state who ends up on a remote farm, under the care of folksy Rima Te Wiata and taciturn bushman Sam Neill. They live on the edge of a forest made for NZ-Tourist-Board ’copter-shots from above, the perfect place for a rebellious teen to run away to. Eventually, Dennison and Neill end up on the lam, with gonzo hunters, special-ops cops, and Paula House’s delightfully over-eager, all-too-fervent child-services worker in hot pursuit.

With its runaway orphan, chaptered intertitles, and foregrounded pop-songs (Leonard Cohen! Rodriguez! Nina Simone!), there’s hints of Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom, but it’s still signature Waititi; especially when the director shows up as a Priest making eulogy analogies by way of Burger Rings and Fanta, or when ol’ pal Rhys Darby swans in as a tin-foil-hat clad off-the-grid idiot. There’s a constant stream of great gags (Stungray, indeed), an ’80s-movie-esque dose of montages, and a sense of genuine sentimentality that never feels forced. It’s a bona fide crowd-pleaser that should play as delightfully on the Big Island as it did back in the Shaky Isles, a 100-minute slice-of-joy from — let’s just officially enshrine this — our newly-adopted native son.

THE NICE GUYS

The Nice Guys is a Shane Black movie. Which means there’s buddy-cop banter, violent slapstick, copious gunfire, a series of escalating set-pieces, and Christmas in Los Angeles. Black infamously sold the Lethal Weapon script for millions in his early 20s, etched himself into eternal B-movie lore with the screenplay for The Last Boy Scout, and then won both fanboy ardour and critical praise with his 2005 directorial debut Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. Those in the know already know what they’re getting; those who don’t, well, read that above list.

Here, it’s Los Angeles in the lurid ’70s: all polyester threads and tube-TV, disco jams and billboards for Airport ’77, fuel crisis and smog alerts, gas-guzzlers and the fledgling porn industry. Russell Crowe is hired knuckle-duster muscle, an old-fashioned, ’50s-morals, noir-movie-ish gumshoe horrified by the “cesspool” of modern life. Ryan Gosling —who, for all his square-jawed dreaminess and meme-iness, is an amazing comic actor— plays a PI who’s a drunken buffoon; a douchey disbeliever in detective work, hunches, and clues-mounting-to-a-conspiracy.

For a film whose shrieking villains and diabolical criminal plot carry all the mettle and menace of a Naked Gun movie, it’s disappointing that the gun-poppin’, fist-fightin’ genre trappings don’t take a backseat to the gags. Gosling gets great moments of slapstick —most of which involve broken glass, and his delusional belief he’s invincible— but the buddy-cop banter lacks the crackle of Black at his best; The Nice Guys a crime-comedy that you wish were more of a comedy.

QUEEN OF THE DESERT

Queen Of The Desert is a period drama as stiff and unmoving as Nicole Kidman’s face. Here, Our Nic plays globe-trotting British polymath Gertrude Bell, an adventuress-cum-writer-cum-cartographer who spent the early decades of the 20th-century in the historical tumult of the Middle East. There’s no surprises in the sumptuous-desert-epic, prestige-picture treatment Bell gets in this biopic, which is all tragic-romance and woman-before-her-time defiance. The only shock, really, is that Werner Herzog is the one bringing this to screen; the great auteurist mystic’s attempts to go matinée straight making for one of his least-essential films.

In spite of the presence of the guy who made Fitzcarraldo and The White Diamond, the top-line actors —Kidman, a delightful Robert Pattinson, a moody James Franco, a posh Damian Lewis— and the glorious widescreen shots of desert sunsets, the film utterly drags; two-hours feeling like an eternity. Were this failed piece of tasteful Oscar-bait the work of some mediocre British craftsman, it might sting less; but given Herzog’s long career of making vivid portraits of oddball iconoclasts and quixotic visionaries, the overly-mannered, tasteful, tea-sipping depiction of Bell feels like one long —long, long, long— letdown.