The kid is Ricky (Julian Dennison), a well-fed, gangster rap-loving orphan released from care in the city to stay on the outer fringes with his new keepers: huggy “Auntie” Bella (Rima Te Wiata) who wears cat sweaters even while she enthusiastically guts wild boars, and “Uncle” Hector (Sam Neill), a terse sort whose idea of a fun night in involves sharpening his axe blades. After Bella drops dead one afternoon, and news filters through that the authorities are coming to reclaim him, Ricky flees to the hills, Hector close behind, an uptight child services inspector (Rachel House) pursuing them both.
It’s a not unpromising set-up – masculinity left to fend for itself against Mother Nature – and I wished Waititi had made merry with his hapless hunter-gatherers in the same way Shadows did with wannabe outlaw vampires. Alas, that’s not the film we get. Adapted from Barry Crump’s novel, Wilderpeople boasts more structure than its sketchy predecessor, but it’s also a softer, more conventional experience: we quickly twig nothing awful is going to happen to Ricky and Hector in these woods (no Blair Witch, this), and that going bigger seems to have deprived Waititi of whatever edge he might once have had.
I wonder whether the absence of head vamp Jemaine Clement from the writing credits isn’t a factor: we’re back in the tryingly quirky waters of Waititi’s 2007 debut Eagle vs. Shark here. Shadows had some of the obnoxious-flatmate comedy of The Young Ones in its DNA to keep matters lively, but Wilderpeople is the kind of lazily genial bonding expedition you’ll have seen (and nodded off through) countless times before: it even fends off the suspicion there might be something untoward in the Ricky-Hector relationship via the exact same double entendres School of Rock ventured over a decade ago.
At least Neill’s having fun, retreating beneath Hector’s hat and beard, but it further dilutes the joke that – twisted ankle aside – the character is in fact an eminently capable protector. Much will depend on how charming you find the precocious young Dennison: the kid’s funny – mining droll pathos from Ricky’s U-turn on the best birthday he’s ever had (“it’s the only birthday I’ve ever had”) – but, boy, does he seem to know it, and Waititi’s hair-ruffling direction rarely undercuts that knowledge. By the time we’re being implored to mourn for Ricky’s dog, the comic spark’s been snuffed out by sentiment.
Consolations include the Kiwi scenery, and two legitimately funny cameos: from Waititi himself as a novice priest whose idea of a stirring funeral oration involves painfully convoluted parables, and from Rhys Darby as a hermit. Yet the latter’s livewire presence in the final reel only points up how flat and Chris Columbussy the surrounding scenes are. Where Shadows ploughed its own furrow through the bloodsucker genre, this follow-up stakes out an altogether conventional path and sticks rigidly to it – a taped audition for the studio big leagues, from a filmmaker who’s so far doodled his best work in the margins.
(MovieMail, September 2016)
Hunt for the Wilderpeople returns to selected cinemas, to mark its tenth anniversary, this Friday.
