Hunt For The Wilderpeople * * * *

Back off Skip.  Make your own film!

Let's steal it!  We claimed: Sam Neil, Russell Crowe, Gillian Armstrong to name just a few. Might as well nick this too - Yeah, “Hunt for the Wilderpeople”, good Aussie film.

We wish!

Which begs the question why can a country one tenth our size both in landmass and population produce quality films like this and Boy whilst we still fart around with three times the budget and one third the result.

Anyway the Kiwis can and they do.  Hunt for the Wilderpeople is no masterpiece but damn it’s good!  This film produces characters which, if performed by some pumped up Hollywood actor would be declared as Oscar material.

The humour is unique. Sometimes the characters speak and behave like they’re from a comedy sketch -  except they mean it.  It’s like if they saw you laughing they'd ask you “What’s so funny?”

The only actor with any real international experience is Sam Neil who puts in a wonderful performance - but doesn’t he always?

He is partnered through the film by a relatively unknown disturbingly obese child actor who is absolutely charming, funny, and convincing in his role as Ricky, a boy with an orphanage upbringing.

Ricky is dumped on to his remotely located Aunt and Uncle Hec. When circumstances cause Ricky to go Bush Uncle Hec goes looking for him; but after finding him he breaks his leg. They have not choice but to wait for him to recover before they can walk out the bush.  In the meantime, the authorities are under the impression that the Uncle has taken the boy away for indecent reasons and a manhunt begins, with Ricky and Uncle Hec and their two dogs surviving in the wilderness.

Hunt for the Wilderpeople makes no apology for it’s implausibility, because that’s not the point.  It’s a film that is very confident in itself which goes a long way to making its succesful.  It adopts a story, humour and characters woven together in a whole that could easily come apart.  It doesn’t. It holds together with both a touching and hysterically funny outcome.