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'Eagle vs. Shark' movie review |
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Written by Colin Covert, MCT
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Friday, 06 July 2007 |
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EAGLE VS. SHARK
1 ½ stars
Starring: Jemaine Clement, Loren Horsley
Directed by: Taika Waititi
Rated R for language, some sexuality, and brief animated violence.
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Jemaine Clement and Loren Horsley play slackers in love in "Eagle vs. Shark," a quirky romcom from New Zealand whose appreciation for Napoleon Dynamite tests the boundaries of copyright infringement.
Horsley is a wan fast-food counter girl. Clement is a lunchtime regular, a narcissistic chain-store electronics salesman who makes her heart do back flips like a beef patty on the grill. She woos him with free french fries and crashes his ultra-exclusive video game party where guests are obliged to come in a costume representing their favorite animal. She arrives dressed for a grade-school production of "Jaws." He presides over the glum little bash looking like a giant chicken.
Although they're incompatible on every basis except their shared nerdiness, first-time feature director Taika Waititi shepherds them through the straits of romance to a warmhearted finale.
The film has a few serviceable ideas (aren't we all playing games; aren't we all wearing disguises?) and a daft sense of surrealism. As the mismatched pair stumble toward their happy ending, Waititi repeatedly shifts focus to the stop-motion animated adventures of two half-eaten apples whose exploits parallel the stars'.
What's lacking is the spark of inspiration. The misfit protagonists never develop much depth; we're supposed to accept that her heart is his eternally after one comically desultory bout of sex. Horsley's timid manner and Clement's cocksure bravado don't offer the formula for opposites that attract. They seem to be standing at the far ends of an unbridgeable gap.
The story ambles among a number of weirdo characters (her brother converses in lines quoted from Arnold Schwarzenegger movies; his dad occupies a wheelchair out of sheer laziness) with never a sane person in sight.
The feeble dramatic mainspring is Clement's mission of vengeance against the tough guy who shamed him in high school. There are mildly amusing training sequences where he readies himself like a clumsy 13-year-old in ninja school. The showdown itself is rudely funny - the old bully is in no position to defend himself; Clement, frustration boiling over, flails at him anyway. And it's entertaining to hear the actors do things to vowels with their New Zealand accents that cry out for humanitarian intervention.
But the movie is so self-consciously odd and twee it's hard to connect with the sad-sack characters. Waititi borrowed the formula for "Dynamite" but created a damp firecracker. | Only registered users can write comments.
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