Film / Reviews
The Dark Horse
The Dark Horse (15)
New Zealand 2014 125 mins Dir: James Napier Robertson Starring: Cliff Curtis, Wayne Hapi, James Rolleston
If you fancy a bit of grit with all your favourite inspirational teacher and ‘triumph of the underdog’ clichés, The Dark Horse is the movie for you. James Napier Robertson’s true-ish story adds a garnish of Shine-style mental illness to a plot you’ll recognise from the glut of American dance/basketball/whatever crowd-pleasers in which troubled kids from the Wrong Side of the Tracks find redemption and purpose through sport/hoofing about/spelling bees, etc., etc. But at least it does so in a different setting – New Zealand’s downtrodden Maori community – with a central performance by Once Were Warriors star Cliff Curtis of sufficient power to transcend the story’s over-familiarity.
Curtis plays mumbling, lumbering, mostly toothless, shaven-headed, bipolar former speed chess prodigy Genesis Potini, who’s released into the care of his brother Ariki (Hapi) and takes up residence in the room of his resentful 15-year-old nephew, Mana (Rolleston). But Ariki is a member of a local criminal biker gang, which leads to an inevitable confrontation. Back on the streets of Gisborne, our hero finds salvation at the Eastern Knights chess club, which has been set up to discourage local kids from turning delinquent. With a big national tournament in Auckland just weeks away, he faces a race against time to whip his lovable, feisty, disadvantaged urchins into shape to take on the snotty, privileged middle class kids from the suburbs. Aww, come on – we’ve got to have more obstacles and complications than that. Well, first Genesis needs to keep taking those meds or his erratic behaviour will spook the nippers’ parents into withdrawing them from the team. Then there’s sensitive Mana, who’s about to be ‘patched’ as a member of his dad’s gang and gifted to a fearsome one-eyed psycho for initiation. Not unreasonably, he decides he’d rather be playing chess too, paving the way for a dramatic sibling smackdown.
Connoisseurs of this stuff will find that there are absolutely no surprises in store, although the film does boast more in the way of tattoos and references to Maori legend than the genre generally permits. The absence of manipulative sentimentality and steadfast refusal to romanticise mental illness are also refreshing. But it’s Cliff Curtis’s committed and commanding performance as the late Genesis Potini that proves to be the trump card.
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