Hunt for the Wilderpeople review: Kiwi buddy movie set in the ‘Kiwi’ bush-lands…

ABOVE: Julian Dennison and Sam Neill star in Hunt for the Wilderpeople. Photograph: Allstar/Piki Films

Fan’s rejoice, Taika Waititi’s follow-up to ‘What We Do in the Shadows’ is a family comedy that is surprising more heart-warming than bite and has great, hearty performances in it’s small but core cast.

A big-hearted picture full of small, understated moments of magic, the New Zealand-based comedy-drama is a charmer. Waititi’s new movie downplays the broad laughs of its predecessor (Vampires and Werewolves), instead focusing on the emotional thrust of a mismatched buddy movie.

A man (Sam Neill) and a runaway boy (the brilliant, Julian Dennison) are on the run in the dense and vast New Zealand wilderness. The man is Hec, an archetypal Kiwi bloke with a rollie smouldering away in one hand and the stock of his rifle in the other, plus sheepdog too.

The boy is Ricky Baker (you’ll know his name by the end of the movie). He’s a great kid, with his heart in the right place, but he’s set fire to one too many mailboxes 9thrown things, stole things, spat at things (a running joke throughout the film) for his last foster family to cope with and now Ricky has washed up on the isolated back country farm of Hec and his beloved wife Bella or ‘Aunt’ played by the superb – Rima Te Wiata.

Hunt For The Wilderpeople is Taika Waititi’s fourth feature, and only gets beat by the mighty Thor: Ragnarok for laughs galore…

To tell you what else rolls out in the first third of Hunt For The Wilderpeople and how Hec and Ricky come to be on the run would be a spoiler too far. But that first act is a goldmine of character and comedy.

Not that any of the central characters would admit to anything as fluffy as an emotional journey. Ricky (Julian Dennison) is a troubled orphan, raised on hip-hop and rejection. Placed with the latest in a series of foster families, this time on a farm far away from the city where he styles himself a gangster, Ricky is reluctant.

Hec is remote, an isolated man and a Mr Soppy-pants too boot. But Bella (Rima Te Wiata) quickly manages to break through Ricky’s defensive shell by taking him hunting and giving him a dog for his 13th birthday, which he names Tupac after his idol Tupac Shhakur. Bella, with her down-to-earth love and affectionate mockery eventually infects young Ricky with a sense off everything will be great in his life fromnow on.

However, when a tragedy threatens to steal back the life that Ricky has come to love, (spoilers: Bell dies) the boy finds himself on the run in the bush (spoilers: Ricky ineptly fakes his suicide by burning a barn and runs away into the bush with Tupac) and eventually, his adopted not-so Uncle Hec (Sam Neill) comes to find him.

Meanwhile, the authorities (led by, Rachel House’s child protection agency officer) have found the house empty and the barn burnt down, and come to the conclusion that the bereaved and mentally unstable Hec has abducted Ricky.

Gradually, the two rejected loners who only had Bella in common find a kinship, united against the authorities and a national manhunt, that hunt them down, and the two slowly bond while working together to escape arrest.

Closing to the end of the film, when the authorities are nearly upon the mismatched pair, Kiwi funnyman (Rhys Darby), a survivalist called Psycho Sam pops-up. Sam lets them stay the night at his hideaway.

But after five months of surviving in the wilderness and several close calls, they are finally caught following a car and helicopter chase, and Ricky accidentally shoots Hec in the buttock.

Hec gets remanded and Ricky is taken in by Kahu’s family. After Hec’s release from jail, Ricky, with his new foster family’s permission, returns to the bush with Hec to photograph the Huia, an extinct bird they had re-discovered during their time on the run.

Julian Dennison and Sam Neill star in the Taika Waititi film Hunt for the Wilderpeople. But Wilderpeople, like ‘Boy,’ has got some trouble in mind and a whiff of darkness around its edges.

At the heart of both films is an abandoned kid trying to survive or escape from a potentially toxic relationship. While, James Rolleston’s portrayal in  ‘Boy’ had to grow past his old man’s lies. But in Wilderpeople young Ricky must learn to be something more than society – personified here by Rachel House’s cartoon-villain Child Welfare Officer – has told him he is ever going to be.

RATING: 4 / 5 stars

Wilderpeople emerges as a hugely likeable but not always coherent yarn. There are moments of sheer laugh-out-loud genius, fun cameos, great one-liners. But at other times (mainly the end sketch), the movie misses a mark and goes into the absurd.

Taika always finds away to pop-up in all his own movies… and an early cameo from the Kiwi is funny enough, but feels misjudged in a scene that might have yielded more of an emotional pay off down the river if it had been played a little straighter.

Another weakness is the forever sweeping helicopter shots that take in what Ricky describes as the “majestical” New Zealand countryside.

But more effective are the 360-degree pans, which are a neat alternative to the standard passing-of-time montage sequence. But the film’s main asset is an unaffected naturalism, both in the film-making, and in the unpolished characters that we root for. A great family film for all ages.

Hec (Sam Neill), Ricky (Julian Dennison) and Bella (Rima Te Wiata) play off each other superbly. Characters are deftly sketched in, with an abundance of terrific jokes that cracks a few ribs, like a champion. Also, (Tioreore Ngatai-Melbourne, a remarkable poise for her years), gives terrific, supporting performances as Kahu and singer, songwriter(Stan Walker) appears as Ron.

The idea of cramming an entire filmshoot into just five weeks is central to Waititi’s big new idea of rolling out a lot more Kiwi films quickly – his company Piki films has works in progress from Oscar Kightley, Madeleine Sami and others they want to get moving.

supplied: Taika Waititi on set with Stan Walker, Mike Minogue and Cohen Holloway, who play a trio of hunters in his movie Hunt for the Wilderpeople.

YOU CAN SEE WHY The film won seven categories at the 2017 NZ Film Awards, including Best Film, and Best Actor for Dennison. He’d first worked with director Taika Waititi in 2013, on a drug driving commercial.

…finally, what makes Wilderpeople memorable is how attached audiences become to the characters, and as played by Dennison and [Sam] Neill, they are two fully realised, full of flaws but nonetheless oh-so loveable human beings.

ABOVE: Don’t fret, Young Julian Dennison will star alongside Ryan Reynolds in Deadpool 2.

While Sam Neill will (fingers crossed) hopefully, be returning to a certain dinosaur-in-a-park-franchise!