Eagle vs. Shark

A sadly unfunny and cliché-ridden attempt at a romantic comedy.

Eagle vs. Shark Review /

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Eagle Vs Shark: Trailer

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With the New Zealand film Eagle vs Shark attracting comparisons to Napoleon Dynamite, audiences have just cause to fear the worst. Both films feature hypocritical 'celebration' (read mockery) of nerdy underdogs, both are cringingly cute, and neither is very funny. Eagle vs Shark has the added problem of being simultaneously unbelievable and predictable down to its last corny detail, but it’s the desperate struggle to be quirky and kitschy that grates the most.

What little plot there is concerns the rocky relationship between Lily (Loren Horsley) and Jarrod (Jemaine Clement). Both of them are socially inept. She has a winsome smile, works in a fast food outlet, tells feeble jokes and is a whiz at video games. He makes trashy wax sculptures, talks in self-aggrandising clichés and vows to wreak vengeance on the guy who beat him up at school. Jarrod hosts a party where you have to come dressed as your favourite animal, hence the title. He says “Do you wanna have sex?” and Lily says “Yep”. Riveting stuff.

When the funniest line in a movie is, “You’re a bitch and you’re gonna die of diabetes”, it’s got real problems. Writer-director Taika Cohen tries to flesh out the central love story with the inclusion of numerous minor characters, but to no avail. When Lily and Jarrod drive to his home town on the “revenge mission”, we meet his family and friends – and almost without exception, they’re gormless caricatures. Not for a minute do you care what happens to anyone.

Eagle vs Shark is wafer-thin and eminently missable…unless you think that romantic comedies are improved by irony and oddball animated sequences.

A sadly unfunny and cliché-ridden attempt at a romantic comedy.

Filmink 1.5/5

Only redeeming qualities are the lovely cinematography and an agreeable score.

Michael Adams

Even serious dramas usually provide some comic relief from the heavy emotions on screen. So when you don’t laugh even once during what’s supposed to be a comedy you know there’s something wrong.

And there’s something very, very wrong with Eagle vs Shark, the latest loser comedy that seeks to cash in on Napoleon Dynamite.

This is a nerd comedy about video game employee Jarrod who finds love with his female equivalent in Lily, a recently sacked fast food server. They become lovers after attending his animal-themed party. She then accompanies him to his hometown so he can avenge himself on a schoolyard bully.

The thing with Napoleon Dynamite was that he was likeable in his deeply eccentric, childish manner. Jarrod’s just an infantile idiot – and a preening, self-obsessed fool. Perhaps that’s the point, but I spent 86 long, long minutes wondering whether Lily was actually brain damaged for loving him.

The filmmakers blithely assume we’ll find non-sequitur nerd talk and trash taste thrift store clothing funny and charming. To me, it’s a sneering attitude – mercilessly making these characters the most pathetic losers ever, and then expecting us to find it somehow cute or ironic is insulting.

Eagle vs Shark’s only redeeming qualities are the lovely cinematography and an agreeable score from The Phoenix Foundation.

If you want to see a lot of adult actors acting like five-year-old kids, this is your movie. I just wanted it to end.

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