Review of Eagle vs Shark

Hoped I was really going to like this, because it was billed as a comedy and everything else I've watched lately has been dark, even the comedies. But of course it turned out to be mainly sad too - about a loser geek who works in a video game shop and hasn't got over (a) being bullied at school and (b) the fact that his brother, who took his own life, was the favoured son of his father. 

Another loser, a woman who works at a really depressing burger chain and is disliked by all her co-workers, who soon conspire to sack her while pretending that it was a decision by higher management, has a crush on the geek. They start a relationship, have terrible sex, and then she follows his back to his home town so that he can take revenge on the Samoan guy who bullied him at school...who of course has forgotten all about it and is in a wheelchair following an accident.

It's mainly very painful...the geek is a self-deceiving fantasist, not very bright and at once transparently stupid and tragic. The woman is also hopeless and sad, redeemed somewhat by the love of her quite-geeky brother, but the "happy ending" is that she restarts the relationship with the geek, even though he has previously broken off with her to claim that he is in relationship with the better-looking former girlfriend of his dead brother...though of course he never was.

Incidentally I learned that director Taika Waititi, surely NZ’s most famous, was born Taika Cohen, and is “Polynesian Jewish”.