KEY POINTS:
Herald rating: * *
THE TATTOOIST
Cast: Mia Blake, Jason Behr, Robbie Magasiva, David Fane
Director: Peter Burger Rating: R13 (violence, offensive language, sex scenes) Running time: 92 mins
Screening: SkyCity, Hoyts
Verdict: It's got plenty of local buzz but it's neither as scary as it should be nor as culturally interesting as it thinks.
It's an intriguing idea for a spook story: What if the spiritual significance attached to your ethnic tattoo actually manifested itself and found it needed to put you in the picture a little more?
That's part of the premise to this New Zealand-Singaporean co-production. It stars many familiar local faces but is headed by imported horror movie regular Behr as Jake Sawyer, brooding his way around the world as an itinerant American tattooist who, encountering the Samoan traditional art of tatau, finds himself trying to put the deadly spirit he appears to have unleashed back in the ink bottle.
He has local help from Sina (Blake) who soon becomes more than just a friendly native guide to South Auckland, despite the disapproval of her Dad (Fane) and local tatau artist Alipati (Magasiva). But it seems that Sawyer's client-base are soon all coming down with something more serious than hep C, while the rattle of skeletons in the closet of the Samoan community is playing in time with the log drums. Many of the early victims of the graphic (quite literally) violence which Sawyer seems to have caused are Asian, which should keep those Singaporean backers happy.
But while director Burger's feature debut (from a script by Matthew Grainger and Jonathan King) starts off promisingly and smartly-paced, it soon drags itself into incoherence. It's capped off with a silly ending which suggests that the budget - used so nicely elsewhere to decorate most of the cast - was running a bit low for the blood-letting finale.
The locals do their best with some clunky lines, the versatile Fane a standout as the overbearing patriarch while Michael Hurst's brief turn as a cockney-accented mentor to Sawyer is something to behold. Unfortunately for the lead, Behr's Sawyer isn't the most engaging character. His hide might be richly decorated but the rest of him remains a blank canvas.
In the end The Tattooist can't deliver a decent fright-factor nor say anything worthwhile culturally. And if a real real tattoo artist was as uneven as this film, you would leave the parlour wishing he had spent some more time getting those working drawings right before inflicting all that pain.
