Cop drama light relief for Tem

By ELEANOR BLACK

Detective Sergeant Ihaka comes from the Magnum PI school of leading men.

He infuriates his superiors in the Auckland police by doing exactly what he wants while sporting a cheeky grin and loud Hawaiian shirt. All that's missing, says Temuera Morrison, the man who brings the cocky cop to life, is the red Ferrari.

Morrison stars with another New Zealand actor, Rebecca Gibney, in tonight's Australian telemovie Ihaka: Blunt Instrument.

A tongue-in-cheek take on the standard cop drama, the film was shot in Auckland and Sydney two years ago and gave Morrison, best known for his portrayal of tortured tough guys, the chance to play against type.

"I had a wonderful working relationship with Rebecca and our director [Peter Fisk] and ... if we could make our dry-wit cameraman, Nino, laugh - if he kind of went huh, huh, huh at the end of a scene - we knew we were in the zone somewhere. So every now and then I'd throw away the script and see what else I could come up with. If Nino kind of grunted or laughed a little bit, we knew it might work."

The Auckland-based actor has since moved on to a featured role in Star Wars: Episode II, which premieres in the United States in May, but says he would love to try another humorous film.

"Nobody ever thinks of me in a comedy role. I'm a pretty funny guy, my life is a comedy."

It must seem that way as the Star Wars publicity machine cranks into action. Morrison, who plays the coldly efficient bounty hunter Jango Fett, is starring in a Playstation game and will have his own doll.

"I think my character will be one of the popular ones," he says, resigned to a round of publicity appearances.

Morrison has a knack for making seemingly unlikeable characters likeable.

Ihaka is the classic unconventional cop, drinking beer on the job, hitting on female colleagues and drifting in and out of the station as he pleases. He is annoying, and worse, violent. It is after beating a man with a baseball bat that he is sent to Sydney to learn about proper police procedure.

He is partnered with a prissy media relations officer, Inspector Kirsty Finn (Gibney), to review the unsolved murder of an up-and-coming model, and it turns out that despite the cruddy attitude, he is good at his job.

While Ihaka is solving the case using old-fashioned police work, Finn twiddles importantly with the police computer system and spends a lot of time rolling her eyes and exhaling loudly with irritation. Secretly, of course, she finds her partner irresistible.

It is all rather predictable and is not helped by some bizarre secondary characters with dreadful foreign accents - notably the police chief in Auckland, who may or may not be Irish, and the murdered girl's rockstar boyfriend, who may or may not be English.

But Morrison and Gibney make the most of the comedy and the film ends up being a lot better than the writers deserve.

By the end you really want the "mischief Maori cop" to make a good impression on his pretty partner, and you are relieved when she starts to respond to his gifts of doughnuts and takeout pizza.

After all, Magnum PI was always good with the ladies.

* Ihaka: Blunt Instrument, TV3, 8.30 pm