Hunt For The Wilderpeople (EOTWS)

End Of The Week Shorts #14 extract: Hunt For The Wilderpeople (2016)

Hunt For The Wilderpeople is a fun and quirky on-the-run adventure movie. It is full of playful direction and brilliant writing, but sometimes the structure and the edit fail to control the movie's comedic contrast of realism and fantasy which leaves a few sequences silly - and not in a good way. Moreover, whilst the direction is playful and does provide some small bits of ingenuous (though never entirely original) design, it sometimes looses focus, reducing some of the cinematic language to pretty bland spectacle that most YouTubers with drones and Final Cut pro will squeeze out of their Macs. 

The most surprising element of this narrative were the two central performances which, though they weren't technically perfect, were a brilliant match for this idiosyncratic narrative. So, whilst this is a bit dumb and ill-designed at some points, Hunt For The Wilderpeople was a good watch and just one of those movies you're kind of glad exists.