Hunt for the Wilderpeople review – Sam Neill is warm and wise in Taika Waititi’s goofily tremendous film
The recent sad loss of Sam Neill is a great opportunity to revisit one of his greatest roles, in this tremendous family film from 2016, a goofy mix of Butch and Sundance and Chaplin’s The Kid. It’s arguably the masterpiece of its writer-director Taika Waititi, who adapted the 1986 bestseller Wild Pork and Watercress by New Zealand author Barry Crump, bringing his distinctive irony, comedy and quirk (Waititi has a droll cameo as a wacky vicar), but wisely lets the story and performances do the real work, so the movie continues to win the hearts of audiences.
Neill plays Hector, a grouchy old buzzard who works on a farm on New Zealand’s North Island just below the vast forested wilderness of the breathtakingly beautiful Te Urewera. The property is owned by his big-hearted wife Bella (Rima Te Wiata) who works as a foster parent, regularly taking in troubled kids, and Hector is under no illusions that she married him in the same charitable spirit. But glum, taciturn Hector is not best pleased when Bella takes in the toughest and most recalcitrant teen the state authorities have ever dealt with. This is Ricky, played by Maori actor Julian Dennison, and Rachel House gives an amusing performance as Paula, the child welfare worker who is on Ricky’s case.
Bella has a tactless habit of referring cheerfully to Ricky’s size, but the boy can certainly sense her kindly and wise nature and it actually seems as if this unlikely new foster family is going to live together happily. But then an awful fate intervenes and Hector and Ricky go on the run together in the jungle, being tracked by the pitiless forces of the state who want to put the boy into “juvie”. Bad-tempered, self-reliant Hector, for all his impatience, is darned if he’s going to let these bullies push the boy – or him – around. A nationwide manhunt gets under way for this odd couple, who are now living on pure instinct, moving across tough terrain like a human version of wildebeest, and the general public, hearing about them on breathless TV news reports, begin to feel that they are the underdog heroes.
The sentimental possibilities of the drama are amusingly undercut by Waititi, particularly with a series of gags which make it look as if Hector is going to seem like a child molester; there’s some funny stuff too for the hatchet-faced Paula who quarrels with Ricky when she comes face to face with him in the undergrowth. She compares herself to the Terminator, and Ricky crossly claims that he is the one who is like the Terminator, at which point Paula petulantly snaps that Ricky is more like “Sarah Connor ... from the first movie, before she could do chin-ups.” Neill gives a lovely, gentle and wise performance.