Toa Fraser, who made the admired costume oddity Dean Spanley, takes on more muscular fare with this brutal action movie set in pre-colonial New Zealand, and shot entirely in the Maori language. James Rolleston plays a youth whose tribe is destroyed by ruthless enemies, and whose journey of redemption takes him through the feared “Dead Lands”, reputedly haunted by a man-eating monster (Lawrence Makoare). The ensuing battles use traditional paddle-like weapons that are deadlier than they look, and much slaughter ensues: this is a film that, at moments, takes the notion of bloodthirstiness quite literally. There’s also much speechifying, some of it so grandly Shakespearean (“I have a blackness that comes upon me where even the God of War would not venture”), it’s a wonder it all fits into the subtitles. Resembling Mel Gibson’s Mayan jungle drama Apocalypto with more overt Asian action-cinema influences, this similarly foliage-heavy epic powers away relentlessly and soon becomes numbing – except when Makoare waggles his tongue in traditional warrior manner, which is genuinely a fearsome thing to behold.
