Boy

Paladin (II) | Release Date: March 2, 2012

7.3	USER SCORE Generally favorable reviews based on 35 Ratings

USER RATING DISTRIBUTION

Positive:

Mixed:

Negative:

Watch Now

Stream On

Buy on

Stream On

Expand

Review this movie

VOTE NOW

0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Please sign in or create an account before writing a review.

Check box if your review contains spoilers

0 characters (5000 max)

User Reviews

User score By date Most helpful

ShiiraMay 21, 2012

This review contains spoilers, click expand to view. Grace never had a chance. Stuck with a lush for a mother, an ogre for a dad, and a well-meaning, yet complicit older brother, the young girl, whose aspect mirrored her namesake, would have benefited from a big sister, somebody who saw with clear eyes that the community Grace belonged to was no place for a woman. In Lee Tamahori's Once Were Warriors, a riveting filmic representation of an indigenous people's cultural estrangement, Nig, the sovereignty-minded gang member, proved to be negligent in pushing Grace to reject outright the notion of a localized marriage and its violent hereafter. If Nig encouraged his sister to escape the urban subculture of their alcoholic parents, he could have saved the young storyteller's life. But instead, he presumed that Grace would resign herself to a Maorian girl's fate, telling the girl that "they'll be plenty of time for you to clean up after drunken f*****' parties," in the aftermath of another domestic disturbance. Grace's bedroom, however, indicated that she had no such designs on marrying her own kind, not with the posters of American movies adorning her walls, suggesting that the Maorian was looking for somebody who looked like Mel Gibson or Danny Glover, and not her father, the real lethal weapon. Unbeknownst to her family, Grace had plans on leaving home, since "the guys around here," to the girl, were "too ugly," a barbed commentary in regard to the cul de sac's potential lot of future husbands that was less about faces than hearts. Nig, who knew the feral ways of their father, somehow misses this barely-concealed dig at the Maori men outfitted with their hyper-machismo comportments despite the house tornado and the interiors dripping with matriarchal blood. To her best friend, a homeless boy living under the parkway, Grace had asked, "Do you think we'll get out of here," a question with a self-evident answer, since it was made in an abandoned car, a husked vehicle that was obviously going nowhere. In Eagle vs. Shark, the filmmaker's 2007 debut, the most important character, as it pertains to Maori identity, is left off-screen; she's the woman that Grace could have been, the girl who struck out on her own and married an outsider; in this case, a white man, and settled down to raise this multi-cultural family in the suburbs. Whereas Once Were Warriors advocated a return to one's roots, the Taku Whenua Tuturu of Beth's childhood, Eagle vs. Shark promotes assimilation among the middle-class, a dislocating quintessence for the female escapee that ends in divorce, leaving behind three half-breed Maorian children, including Jerrod, the confused urbanite who returns to the environs, site of a bad childhood, so he can beat up a high school nemesis and restore the family's honor. Staged as a comedy, in a sense, Jerrod's predilection for brutality is no laughing matter. His Samoan opponent, now wheelchair bound and penitent, doesn't stop Jerrod from going through with the fight, which he inexplicably loses, somewhat one-sidedly. He's no Jake the Muss; call him Jerrod the Wuss, but like the tyranny in which the slave descendant holds sway over his battered wife, the seemingly harmless electronics salesman, earlier in the film, as an avatar in a video game called Fight Man, beats Lily to a bloody pulp, even though his prospective girlfriend doesn't defend herself, similar to the scene of domestic abuse in the Tamahori film. In Boy, the 11-year-old Maori kid lives neither in the ghetto nor in suburbia; he resides by the ocean in a village, but like the Heke kids and Jerrod, the plaintively-named child grows up without knowing where he came from. The ancestors are left stranded in the ether that overlooks Waihau Bay, waiting for the lost children of New Zealand to be cognizant of their accessibility; ancestors who are no doubt chagrined from the undue neglect, made doubly invisible by false idols. Instead of the haka, the boy moonwalks, like his hero Michael Jackson, therefore denying his forebearers an entry point into his soul; his Kiwi essentiality co-opted by the popular culture of the west. He needs a role model, somebody such as Bennett, the social worker who teaches "Boogie" how to carry himself like a warrior. Sadly, the boy's paroled father, albeit neither mean-spirited nor violent, has nothing to teach his son. Alamein's "Crazy Horses" jacket links Boy to the short film Two Cars, One Night, whose real subject is not the banter between Romeo and Polly, but the children's alcoholic parents, who leave them unattended while they get loaded at the bar. His younger brother, lost in a book about Crazy Horse, wants to be a lawyer, a dream unrealized, as suggested by Alamein's apparel, which plays like a tribute, perhaps, to a dead loved one. What kind of man will boy turn out to be? Will he smoke pot and drink firewater, and become a zombie like his pop in the music video parody of Thriller? Can he break this ugly cycle?… Expand

0 of 1 users found this helpful01

All this user's reviews