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Review: In ‘Hunt for the Wilderpeople,’ Lighting Out for the Bush

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By Manohla Dargis

June 23, 2016

“Hunt for the Wilderpeople” takes a troika of familiar story types — the plucky kid, the crusty geezer, the nurturing bosom — and strips them of cliché. Charming and funny, it is a drama masquerading as a comedy about an unloved boy whom nobody wants until someone says, Yes, I’ll love him. Much of the humor comes from the child, who’s at once a pip and a gloriously expressive ambassador for the director Taika Waititi’s cleareyed take on human nature and movies. Mr. Waititi knows that we love to cry at sad and bad times, but he also knows that people in pain need to get on with their lives.

The story centers on the soon-to-be 13-year-old Ricky (the irresistible Julian Dennison), a New Zealand foster child who, as the movie opens, is being placed with an older couple who live in a pastoral clearing at the edge of the bush. Ricky rapidly bonds with the woman, who goes by Aunty Bella (Rima Te Wiata as the nurturer), but he’s kept at arm’s length by her gruff, taciturn husband, Uncle Hec (Sam Neill, perfect as the house geezer). Like hippies time forgot, Bella and Hec live off the land and its bounty, including boar and the possums that she skins one handful of fur at a time.

Mr. Waititi works fast, setting a bright, light comic mood that owes something to Wes Anderson but is organically his own. Mr. Waititi started out in comedy, shifting to movie directing more than a decade ago with little evident strain. His first features ( “Boy,” “Eagle vs. Shark” ) are imperfect, but also unmistakably of an auteurist piece with strongly defined characters, a deep sense of place and a humorously deadpan view of life’s absurdities. They’re also very sweet. More recently, he and his longtime friend, the comic Jemaine Clement, another New Zealander, directed “What We Do in the Shadows,” a cheerfully silly mockumentary about vampires living as roommates.

Anatomy | ‘Hunt for the Wilderpeople’

Taika waititi narrates a scene from his film with sam neill and julian dennison opening june 24..

The comedy in “Wilderpeople” is quieter than in Mr. Waititi’s earlier movies, which strengthens the story’s realism. Ricky is a funny kid. He’s amusing to look at, for one thing, what with his fish-out-of-water hip-hop threads, and has a gift for bolts from the blue, like the bad-boy haikus he creates (and recites) as part of his therapeutic training. As a child of social services, he throws words like “processing” around, though Mr. Waititi is careful when it comes to Ricky’s history, which is scattered piecemeal throughout. Tragedy touches the characters in “Wilderpeople,” but it doesn’t define them and they’re not into sharing, caring and closure like their American counterparts.

Sorrow descends on “Wilderpeople” soon after it opens, leaving Uncle Hec and Ricky first unmoored and then on the run in the bush, where they’re chased by a social services zealot, Paula (Rachel House), and her minion, Andy (Oscar Kightley). Mr. Waititi likes to play with types of comedy, but he’s partial to modest exaggeration, whether he’s putting the joke across with slapstick, songs, caricature, lovingly deployed insults or a flurry of tableaulike images. All the characters are funny and idiosyncratic, but because they make you laugh in different ways they also register — with the pointed exception of the cartoonish Paula and Andy — as real people rather than as contrivances.

Drawn in crayon by Mr. Waititi, Paula and Andy are burlesques of bureaucratic incompetency. There’s an obvious political dimension to Paula’s fanatical, overblown crusade to flush Ricky and Uncle Hec out of the bush, but her mania is mostly just another clown car that Mr. Waititi enjoys taking out for a spin. For the most part, Mr. Waititi’s politics are as matter of fact as his humor and expressed through his gritty, singular characters, some of whom happen to be white, others of whom happen to be Maori. (Mr. Waititi also wrote the movie, adapting it from the book “Wild Pork and Watercress” by Barry Crump , a best-selling author and self-styled bushman .)

Mr. Waititi’s expansive sense of human beings in “Hunt for the Wilderpeople” allows his characters to endure loss and hardship without forcing them to be wholly limited by their suffering, as marginalized people too often are in fiction. They’re romantic and pragmatic, eccentric and utterly ordinary. They’re also reasonably flawed, as is this movie, but Mr. Waititi transcends most of the narrative bumps and generally dodges the obvious land mines, including cuteness. He’s still finding his way, but he’s already a director who — as he does in a shot of a friendly, undefeated child pausing to wave at a pursuer — can distill a worldview into a single, perfect cinematic moment.

“Hunt for the Wilderpeople” is rated PG-13 (parents strongly cautioned). This is a boy’s adventure story with many of the familiar genre trappings, including guns, knives, dangerous animals and equally threatening people. Running time: 1 hour 41 minutes.

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Hunt for the Wilderpeople Reviews

Waititi's long-in-development adaptation of the Crump's classic has a style and wit all of its own. Neill is delightfully grumpy, but it is Dennison who steals the show. The over the top buffoonery of the final chase is a bit much, though

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 26, 2024

The balance between humanity and comedy is what Taika Waititi does best.

Full Review | Apr 20, 2023

This fun little odyssey pulls from so many directions but always maintains its balance. It’s genuinely tender and sweet but never overly sentimental.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5 | Aug 21, 2022

Achieves a pitch-perfect balance of silly humor and compassionate characters, proving both oddly funny and profoundly moving despite some very clichéd archetypes propelling the story.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Apr 11, 2022

The truly rare family film that's safe for kids, funny and acerbic enough for adults, and surprising enough to keep everyone absorbed.

Full Review | Oct 22, 2021

Hunt for the Wilderpeople is excellent when it focuses solely on the relationship between - and the misadventures of - its two central figures. It's less captivating when the attention turns to several doltish supporting characters.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Aug 18, 2021

It's like Rushmore in the bush - yes, it's Bushmore

Full Review | Jul 6, 2021

A little bit Rambo, a little bit The Goonies, and as good a time as you can ever hope to have in the cinema.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Apr 22, 2021

Bombastic chases, dark humour, and poignantly truthful moments make Hunt For The Wilderpeople more meaningful than many other big name action or comedies out there. Definitely a film that everyone should see.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 21, 2021

Waititi sneaks some bigger ideas in there behind the chase scenes and the shootouts and the crazy characters...

Full Review | Jan 6, 2021

What sticks with you...is the sweetness, the soft edges Neill gives to his bush-savvy curmudgeon, the kid's street "smarts" that're really just naivete.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Dec 23, 2020

It's mostly effective and funny, though not every moment works entirely.

Full Review | Original Score: 7/10 | Dec 5, 2020

It's a unique adventure film that isn't a waste of your time or money.

Full Review | Nov 10, 2020

The two leads have a fantastic chemistry, both comedic and emotional, and Wilderpeople deftly mixes action, comedy, and drama.

Full Review | Original Score: A- | Jul 3, 2020

Waititi proves it by maintaining a cartoonish tone that very well balances drama, comedy, and a sentimentality well worth getting excited for. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 8/10 | Jun 27, 2020

...deliciously deadpan...

Full Review | Jun 25, 2020

Funny, exciting, and deeply moving, Hunt for the Wilderpeople is unlike anything you've ever seen, even though you've seen plenty of things like it.

Full Review | Apr 1, 2020

The always funny Rhys Darby makes a third act appearance as Hunt for the Wilderpeople treks deeper into the unrestrained realm of adventure comedy with absurd glee.

Full Review | Mar 13, 2020

There is a beating heart amidst the crackling one-liners, which once again elevates Waititi's storytelling from the merely entertaining to the instant classic.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Sep 7, 2019

It has everything you want in a film - memorable characters, an interesting story, and, most importantly, heart.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5 | Aug 6, 2019

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Hunt for the Wilderpeople

By David Fear

The coming-of-age tale, the on-the-run road movie, the buddy comedy, the boy’s adventure story — all genres that require a steady hand and a singular sensibility, and all of which you’ll find in Taika Waititi’s goofy, giddy mash-up about two fugitives fleeing authorities in the New Zealand bush. The fact that one half of this criminal couple is a troubled, chubby Maori foster kid named Ricky Baker (Julian Dennison, a deadpan delight) suggests tough-love bromides are on deck. (Thanks to the lad’s infatuation with urban rebels, some no-brainer pop culture references as well: His new dog is immediately christened “Tupac.”) The other outlaw is his “uncle,” a crusty old outdoorsman who answers to Hec ( Jurassic Park’ s Sam Neill) and wants little to do with his wife’s adopted addition to the household. Boom! You’ve got your tried-and-true mismatch. The unreachable irresistible force versus the cantankerous immovable object — it’s not a question of if these defensive icebergs will melt so much as when.

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Even if viewers don’t know the source material — Barry Crump’s 1986 novel Wild Pork and Watercress — they’ll know the bonding is inevitable, especially once circumstances force Ricky and Hec into the wild with a Javert-like child-services worker (Rachel House) in pursuit. The only mystery is how Hunt for the Wilderpeople will handle the journey, and the instinct is to brace for feel-good impact. Waititi tends to go for either overbaked silliness like 2007’s Eagle vs. Shark or the undercooked sappiness of 2010’s my-dysfunctional-childhood parable Boy. (The major outlier is What We Do in the Shadows , a 2014 collaboration with Flight of the Conchords’ Jemaine Clement that instantly established itself as the greatest vampire mockumentary ever.) He’s splitting the difference here, ping-ponging between self-conscious ridiculousness and a sort of heartstring-molesting melodrama, with the occasional Wes Anderson-ish fussiness — dig those fancy-font chapter titles — and tense boar attack thrown in for good measure.

But Waititi also knows there’s a unique groove to be found in the middle of all of this, and when the movie syncs up everything from its auteur’s facility for sight gags to the actors’ impressive young-fuck-up-meets-old-fart chemistry, Wilderpeople generates enough good will to make the stalest of plot devices feel semi-fresh. A little bit of left-of-center humor in a funeral sermon on Jesus and junk food (delivered by Waititi himself as a daffy local priest) makes up for a lot of forced quirk; an innate sense of knowing when to back off from being overtly crowd-pleasing balances out some obvious detours into crowd-pandering à la not-one-but-two of Ricky’s “Shit just got real!” exclamations. For all the stock elements thrown into this indie-cutie gumbo, it’s still flavorful enough to stand out — an oddball and oddly affecting take on two misfits finding their metaphorical partner-in-crime match.

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Review: In ‘Hunt for the Wilderpeople,’ Lighting Out for the
Directed by Taika Waititi. Adventure, Comedy, Drama. PG-13. 1h 41m. By Manohla Dargis. June 23, 2016. “Hunt for the Wilderpeople” takes a troika of familiar story types — the plucky kid, the ...
Hunt for the Wilderpeople
Bombastic chases, dark humour, and poignantly truthful moments make Hunt For The Wilderpeople more meaningful than many other big name action or comedies out there. Definitely a film that everyone ...
'Hunt for the Wilderpeople' Movie Review
By David Fear. June 26, 2016. Julian Dennison and Sam O'Neill in 'Hunt for the Wilderpeople.'. The coming-of-age tale, the on-the-run road movie, the buddy comedy, the boy’s adventure story ...