New Zealand’s answer to 'Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels' sees three
Wellington pool players get mixed up in the local underworld when they
enter a high stakes pool competition run by Daddy, the underworld's
Greek crime boss.
The film mixes sex, violence and pool, to show how each player’s life
outside of pool reflects the way they play the game. Jack (Robbie
Magasiva) is a water cooler salesman who is very confident, good
looking,
and self-centred. He is always on form, and the only thing which he
prioritises above women is pool. He is full of advice for his mates, but
it is advice based on his superficial approach to everything, so he
comes up with some pretty dodgy generalisations about the opposite sex,
spoken as if they were pearls of wisdom.
Thomas (Paolo Rotondo) is good looking, sweet and sensitive. His game is
either on or off, brilliant or abysmal. He is a self described "man of
simple needs" who in his innocence is an easy target to be picked up by
a waitress called Sara (Anne Nordhaus) who has ulterior motives, yet
ultimately this quality proves to be the difference between winning and
losing, for them all, both on and off the table.
The third member of the trio is Wayne (Scott Wills), a likeable but
naïve guy who never seems to think before speaking, a habit which often
gets him into trouble in some very funny but tense scenes where his
tactlessness borders on the suicidal. This is especially so in the scene
where he and Jack meet Daddy for the first time. Daddy has a Robert De
Niro kind of understated menace and when you see him at work with his
barber’s blade, the effect is to make your internal organs shrink with
squeamish empathy. Don’t mess with this guy. It really really makes you
wish Wayne would keep his mouth shut.
Meanwhile there is a pool tournament run by Daddy which the Stickmen, as
they call their team, are entered into by their friendly bar manager,
Dave (John Leigh) who sees their potential to win as the only way out of
his desperate debt situation. I found it hard at first to get past
seeing Leigh as his former incarnation as Lionel Skeggins on Shortland
Street, but there were some great scenes between him and Holden (Daddy’s
right hand man and debt collector) where they both had a calm acceptance
of their roles (debtor and collector) as if they’d been doing it for so
long it was just part of the job, after which they go back to their
families. Holden even offers to drive him to the hospital after one such
episode.
The plot unfolds in a straightforward manner, with the occasional break
as Holden explains the rules of pool, including the Kiwi 'downtrow',
where if you lose without sinking a ball you have to shuffle once around
the table with your trousers at your ankles. I don’t know if this rule
happens in other countries but I can say for sure, for the benefit of
our overseas readers, that it does indeed happen here.
Apart from Kiwiisms like that, there is little to suggest that the
action is set in New Zealand apart from the accents, and the Cuba Mall
fountain. Otherwise it looks and feels as if it could be in any seedy
area of any city, with the same seedy types of characters. Of course as
soon as anyone opens their mouth you know where you are, but at no point
does the movie lurch into the territory of cringe-worthy bad Kiwi acting
that some New Zealand films suffer from. Quite the opposite occurs, in
fact, where the very Kiwiness of it comes across in a gentle, laid back,
humorous and charming way.
All the main characters are likeable in their own way, with Thomas being
the standout. There are no great surprises plot wise, but what few
twists there are I wouldn’t give away. The movie isn’t really about the
plot, though it all ends as it should, but rather it is about the
characters and each of their journeys through the tournament.
Having said that, there is not a lot of character development. No one
seems to examine themselves with any great depth or end up any more
highly evolved than when they started. That really just makes it a film
about three guys who enter a pool tournament. The strength of it lies in
the authenticity of the characters, backed by its dark underworld look
and feel, ably abetted by a great sound track featuring almost entirely
New Zealand artists.
See the Stickmen Web site
http://www.stickmen.co.nz
