New Zealander Taika Waititi, who ten years after his 2004 Oscar-nominated short Two Cars, One Night co-created the hilarious vampire mockumentary What We Do In The Shadows with his friend and fellow comedian Jemaine Clement, has once again struck gold with this off-beat action-comedy about tubby teenager Ricky Baker (Julian Dennison) and ex-con “Uncle” Hec (Sam Neill) who after the sudden death of Ricky’s foster mother “Aunt” Bella (Rima Te Wiata) decide to embark on a bush trek. Think St. Vincent meets A Walk In The Woods.

However, due to an error of judgement by an overzealous care worker Paula (Rachel House) who wrongfully suspects Hec of being a “molesterer”, they end up being pursued by a crack team of special investigators and a crackpot team of bounty hunters led by pencil-tashed Hugh (Cohen Holloway) who are incentivized by a $10,000 reward, which police officer Andy (Oscar Kightley) says will be offered “to anyone who can capture them dead or alive. Oh… alive. They should be alive.”

Based on the book Wild Pork And Watercress by the late Kiwi author Barry Crump, the film is split into ten Ronseal-inspired chapters starting with A Real Bad Egg (Paula’s description of Ricky as he arrives at Hec and Bella’s ramshackle farm) and ending with War (a Mad Max-inspired chase in a four-wheel-drive truck called Crumpy, which was loaned to them by an unhinged conspiracy theorist Psycho Sam (Rhys Darby) who contends that the All Blacks are “not human”.

Phythonesque riffs and dry one-liners aside, where the film really excels is in the thawing relationship between say-it-as-it-is Ricky (here’s his haiku riposte to an old foe: “Kingi, you wanker. You asshole. / I hate you heaps. / Please die soon in pain.”) and say-as-little-as-possible Hec (“Have you ever worked on a farm before or are you just ornamental?”). One an ex-con described by Bella as “a scruffy white drifter who smelled like methylated spirits”; the other, a tubby teenager 52 years his junior who has been pinged from pillar to post in search of a house to call home.

In the end, they are the oddest of odd couples; but the important thing is that they stay a couple. And, if anything, what this and Taika Waititi’s previous film What We Do In The Shadows both celebrate are the outcasts and misfits – The Wilderpeople – who are often consigned to the fringes of society and Hollywood, but here are given time and space to spread their wings and soar. Which, to use Hec-speak, makes Hunt For The Wilderpeeople with its stark but breathtaking cinematography by Lachlan Milne “pretty majestical”.

Video courtesy of: The Orchard Movies

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Peter Callaghan
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