Crooked Earth

By PETER CALDER

(Herald rating: * * * )

There's much to like about the newest local film - in fact it's a co-production with French distributor Pandora who coughed up most of its $6 million budget - which has already been aptly dubbed a Maori Western.

For a start, it looks good (a tribute to the workmanship of LA-based expat director Pillsbury who plainly chafed under unaccustomed budget restrictions), and it makes the most of its locations in the Coromandel Ranges and the country near Bethells Beach, west of Auckland, where Australian cinematographer David Gribble has conjured some real visual magic.

It's a promising story, too: Morrison plays Will Bastion, a soldier who returns from East Timor under an ill-explained cloud. His father has died and his hometown is under the thumb of his brother Kahu (Makoare), the long-maned renegade leader of a gang of land-rights radicals.

Kahu finances his campaign for tino rangatiratanga by running a high-tech dope operation for city crook Timo (Stan Wolfgramm, little big man in a limo, is the film's only disastrously ill-drawn character).

There's more than sibling rivalry at stake here. Will has been charged, by his father's dying wish, to assume the mantle of leadership - a legacy which, for reasons not always clear, he is reluctant to accept - and the film follows his struggle to come to terms with that challenge.

If that idea is sometimes lost, it may be because so many hands have reworked Greg McGee's original story. Crooked Earth follows a somewhat crooked path and its attention strays so often from the hero's dilemma that it loses focus.

As a result it feels much slighter than it looks. Only at moments - such as an excellent scene in which Kahu and his mates gatecrash a land-sale ceremony - does the film achieve a real sense of drama and conflict.

And the subplot involving Will's estranged daughter (Passier-Armstrong) adds a sense of clutter, especially when she conceives an ill-judged romance with a gang errand boy so callow and amoral we find it hard not to share Will's hostility.

It's not hard to see why the film has angered some Maori by linking activism with criminal extremism, though it should be said in its defence that it seeks to be exciting rather than politically correct as it traffics in some important ideas.

In the main roles, Makoare and Morrison have screen presence to burn - though they seem to work better apart than together - and supporting performances (Brunning and Henare in particular) are well handled.

But ultimately the film is undone by its ending. Undeniably spectacular, it seems too weighty for the rest of the story to bear and the makers seek to draw on dramatic credit they never banked.

It's meant to be about brothers playing for keeps, but the deadly earnest isn't there. They look too much like boys who should be told to stop fighting and get ready for tea.

Cast: Temuera Morrison, Lawrence Makoare, Jaime Passier-Armstrong, Quinton Hita, Nancy Brunning, George Henare.

Director: Sam Pillsbury.

Rating: R13 (violence, sexual content, drug use)

Running time: 111 mins.

Screening: Village, Hoyts cinemas from Thursday