• Interview with Taika Waititi and Loren Horsley

PREMIERE.COM'S REVIEW (posted 6/14/07)

We've had Rocky vs. Apollo Creed in Rocky, Nada vs. Frank in They Live, Neo vs. Agent Smith in The Matrix — but nothing can prepare you for the battle royale at the end of Eagle Vs. Shark, an otherwise delicate and eccentric romantic comedy from New Zealand that finds beauty in rotten apple cores and humor in, among other things, a person confessing to a loved one that their mother was kicked in the head by a cow.

The climactic fight in Eagle vs. Shark doesn't actually involve the "Shark" at all, but rather, the scruffy slacker Jarrod, dubbed "Eagle" because he attends a video game tournament in a full avian regalia. There, Eagle faces "Shark," a lowly fast food employee named Lily, who takes an immediate liking to the hard-to-embrace Jarrod. Unfortunately, Jarrod is too busy to notice since he's "in training" to take vengeance on his high school nemesis Eric Elisi, an act that Jarrod believes will earn him back the respect of his family. Even though he's in his thirties, Jarrod remains adamant that he will fight Elisi even though everyone else seems content to leave well enough alone.

Of course, leaving well enough alone is what Jarrod and Lily have both been doing for far too long, which is what's so satisfying about watching the two shed both their game-playing costumes and their immaturity to find out life has a little more to offer. Jemaine Clement and Loren Horsley play the mismatched misfits, a pairing that results in a screen couple as formidable as Laurel and Hardy, with Horsley's straight-faced Lily mugging for the camera as Clement's blustery Jarrod eats the scenery of all in his path.

Yet first-time feature director Taika Waititi is wise enough to create characters rather than caricatures, which separates Eagle vs. Shark from the oh so many romantic comedies where some actors are merely placeholders for plot points. Clement and Horsley's idiosyncratic chemistry makes sense in a world studded with odd birds like Jarrod's sleazy sweatsuit-selling sister and Lily's celebrity-impersonating brother, but the film relies more on its characters' connections to each other than their quirks to push it forward.

And yes, the film is punctuated by a literal knock down, drag out affair that has all the perverse curiosity of watching a "late career" Mike Tyson bout. But by the end, the real knockout is the discovery of this comic gem.

— Stephen Saito