Heavily marketed as the successor to Napoleon Dynamite, the New Zealand indie film Eagle vs. Shark shows what happens when willful quirkiness and extreme ironic detachment overwhelm what should be a sweet and simple love story. The success of Napoleon Dynamite was thanks to its try-anything humor, certainly not its rich storytelling, and the bone-dry, deadpan dialogue that passes for jokes in Eagle vs. Shark is neither funny nor in any way human. When there are no laughs and even fewer emotions, there’s not a whole lot left to grab onto.
Not that writer-director Waititi doesn’t try. He piles on the self-consciously quirky elements, turning main characters Lily (Horsley), a shy, mousy fast-food worker, and Jarrod (Clement), a nerdy, self-involved clerk at a video-game store, into grotesque, inhuman mockeries, impossible to feel for or engage with. The only way this movie might work would be as a sad portrait of mental illness, since clearly both characters have Asperger’s syndrome, or something like that.
Inexplicably, Lily is completely smitten with Jarrod, who pointedly ignores her until she shows up at a costume party dressed as a shark (he’s an eagle, hence the movie’s title), and they start a bizarre romance that’s built on a lack of communication and a total disregard for Lily’s feelings on the part of both characters. Obsessed with enacting revenge on his high-school bully, Jarrod drags Lily with him to his hometown, where he continues to ignore and/or belittle her, while she bonds with his painfully caricatured family.
Waititi’s obviously trying for a bit of pathos, something more than just pointing and laughing at the freaks, but his characters never exhibit anything resembling actual human behavior, and are so irritating and distasteful that you end up rooting against their finding happiness. Clement so effectively sells Jarrod as a sociopathic loser that he inspires both anger and pity, but never amusement or sympathy. That’s the end result of this smug, ugly film: You’re not likely to laugh, and you might feel bad for even thinking you should.