There’s a scene midway through Toa Fraser’s martial-arts action flick The Dead Lands, where a seasoned warrior offers an assessment of his apprentice’s performance in combat earlier that day. He concludes that his younger, weaker protégé is still pretty lousy at battle, but closes on a small consolation: “You’ll be better tomorrow”.
For me, this exchange couldn’t help but translate to an inadvertent review of the entire film, perhaps even a summary of Kiwi action cinema in general.
It’s no secret that we’ve already had a superlative year for New Zealand movies, possibly even the best on record. Between Taika Waititi and Jemaine Clement’s box office busting What We Do In The Shadows, Gerard Johnstone’s hysterical horror-comedy Housebound, Curtis Vowell’s nuanced urban drama Fantail and James Napier Robertson’s triumphant crowd-favourite The Dark Horse, audiences have truly been spoilt for choice with offerings of exemplary national cinema.
Each of these seemed to succeed by personalising the established generic blueprints they were working from, re-contextualising structure and tropes into a specific setting or mood. On paper, it seemed Toa Fraser was to cap the year off by doing the same.
If The Dead Lands smacks of a mark missed, that will largely be attributable to how much more ambitious this project is. A violent chase thriller entirely in te reo (with English subtitles), Fraser’s first foray into genre fare follows the vengeance mission of a Maori chieftain’s son (James Rolleston), as he tracks the men who slaughtered his tribe through rugged, pre-colonial New Zealand bushland. It’s not unlike a Kiwi riff on Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto, replete with the same penchants for historical specificity, immersive natural environments and visceral bloodletting. It’s also a picture that, by design, hinges near entirely on credible stunts and tightly choreographed athleticism to work.
The Dead Lands is an action movie that struggles with its action. Fraser shoots things with a dizzying disregard for coherence and clarity, obscuring the weak spots of his otherwise brutally effective choreography with shaky handheld, suffocating close-ups and a jarring cut. I spent most of the film’s action sequences praying for a master shot that never came; the occasional moment we do see a blow properly connect, or witness a stunning physical feat with some room to position it, only seemed to emphasise the underwhelming staging on either side.
As a chase thriller, momentum also becomes an issue. Too much of the film is spent with key characters bluntly explicating upon the core themes, with the pace sapped every time we must stop our pursuit to discuss savagery or nobility. A thematic discourse beneath the bloodshed is always welcome – as such a thing has become increasingly rare for action movies - but Fraser nevertheless employs his with far too much emphasis. If his action suffers from a lack of clarity, his commentary on the cyclical nature of conflict suffers from too much, eschewing subtlety for direct conversations on the matter. If you couldn’t decipher the point from all that talk about it, then the natural conclusion that occurs during Fraser’s climactic showdown should help; the ideological equivalent of a greenstone patu to the face.
Fortunately, both the fight sequences and thinly veiled statements find moments of salvation through performance. Playing the mysterious warrior of the eponymous “dead lands”, who Rolleston’s apprentice summons to assist in his quest for revenge, Lawrence Makoare quickly becomes the film’s greatest asset. A foreboding physical presence on the battleground and a gruff reservoir of pain off of it, Makoare sells most of Fraser’s stabs at ruthless technicality and emotional resonance with an endlessly magnetic turn that growls and aches with intensity.
A scene where he confronts his demons in a powerful release easily ranks as the film’s most impressive - and that includes that breathless one-man showdown against a hoard of intimidating, athletic warriors he should also get his props for.
There’s always a certain anxiety for New Zealand critics about throwing shade at our national output; we want our cinema to succeed as much as anyone. Audiences still remain somewhat hesitant to seeing homegrown efforts and a single scathing review could literally be the nudge that encourages a viewer not to bother. While this stellar year for Kiwi film we’ve just experienced does alleviate the guilt of my criticism somehow, I feel it should be said that I’m glad that The Dead Lands exists, in spite of my predominantly negative reaction.
Fraser’s work here represents a step toward something and while it doesn’t completely attain the heights of its ambition, it’s still an action film rooted distinctly in the identity of our nation, shot in our country, spoken in our native tongue. That’s something. To bring Aotearoa’s history and heritage to the screen with this level of attentive accuracy - embracing both its cultural mythology and the gritty realism of the time period - will always be a worthwhile endeavour, however the film may fumble there onward.
Helming something of this nature is undoubtedly difficult; you can sense that Fraser is still getting a feel for directing action, and while we could sit around wishing for better execution, we should instead encourage that this execution be built upon. The more supportive our industry and audiences are of exploring new territories, the better the subsequent results will be.
We’re not there yet. But we’ll be better tomorrow.
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