Put “from Taika Waititi and the producers of Hunt for the Wilderpeople” on any poster, and you’ll not only do you have a pretty good impression of what’s the come, but have a ready-made audience lined up to see it.
Written, directed by, and starring Madeleine Sami and Jackie van Beek, The Breaker Upperers is a dark comedy about people who don’t have the courage to break off a relationship. Coming up with ever more elaborate schemes, from staging affairs, to dressing up as policewomen to tell people their partner has died, Jen (van Beek) and Mel (Sami) have soured on love, and instead set up an agency that’s hired to break couples for a living.
Their latest client 17-year-old rugby jock Jordan (James Rolleston), whose fierce high school girlfriend Sepa (Ana Scotney) is a little bit too much for him to handle, and for him to break it off with. But when Mel does the job for him and pretends to be Jordan’s new beau, Jordan actually starts to fall for her instead, and with Sepa not giving up that easily either, it all becomes a lot more messy than a simple “it’s not you, it’s me.”
A quite brilliant concept, and with New Zealand cinema very much on the rise, it’s fair to say were exciting walking into The Breaker Upperers but much of the comedy fell flat. There was nothing particularly wrong with the film, it was just all very bland, with no real quirks to the dialogue, no funny set-pieces, just a predictable plot, with few tangents to spice things up. Coming into the second and third act you’re left waiting for something new to happen, but the film doesn’t develop quickly enough.
The cast are all quite comfortable, with James Rolleston and Ana Scotney shining brighter than others, but The Breaker Upper ers just doesn’t have that zing of previous NZ comedies, and without the brilliance of Waititi to bring it all together, this time around, it just ends up feeling a little subdued.