Taika Waititi's 2016 adventure comedy follows Ricky Baker (Julian Dennison), a city foster kid dumped on a rural New Zealand couple, and his reluctant bushman guardian Hec (Sam Neill), after a sudden loss forces the pair into the wilderness together.
Waititi adapted and directed it from Barry Crump's 1986 novel Wild Pork and Watercress. It rewards viewers drawn to deadpan New Zealand humor paired with real stakes: a manhunt comedy that keeps its jokes and its grief in the same frame.
It arrived at an odd moment for Waititi's profile: made right as he was confirmed to direct Thor: Ragnarok, it now sits in the gap between his scrappy New Zealand comedies and his move into studio blockbusters, and audiences chasing the Marvel work often skip past the film that got him hired for it.
The distinctive move is structural: Waititi's script invents a nationwide manhunt, complete with police, armed offenders squads and Rhys Darby's conspiracy-minded bushman Psycho Sam, none of which exists in Crump's novel. The book ends on a quieter, more bittersweet note; the film escalates into outright chase-movie spectacle without losing the grief that opens it, a willingness to let slapstick and mourning share scenes that is the film's real signature.
It is also a genuine New Zealand box-office landmark: the film broke the country's opening-weekend record and went on to overtake Waititi's own Boy as the highest-grossing New Zealand film ever, a milestone he described as simultaneously the best and worst day of his career. Watching it now means seeing the proof before the promotion, the film that made the case for him rather than the one built on his name.
