Spooked

(Herald rating: * * )


As the director of Goodbye Pork Pie, The Quiet Earth and Utu, Geoff Murphy will forever be a legendary figure in New Zealand film history. But while he adapted the road movie, the apocalyptic sci-fi picture and the western to identifiably local stories which domestic audiences wanted to see, he's come unstuck in trying to make the great Kiwi conspiracy thriller.

His first, Never Say Die in the late 80s, was at least jovial, had the benefit of a young Temuera Morrison and repeated Pork Pie's tiki-tour of the country.

Spooked, however, stays resolutely Auckland-bound, stuck in its own heavy traffic, rather unsure of who's in the driving seat, and erratically switching lanes between comedy and paranoid thriller without indicating.

Its springboard is Ian Wishart's winebox inquiry dissection, The Paradise Conspiracy, and the case of Auckland computer dealer Paul White, who having discovered some carelessly discarded banking records, died in a car accident on the night he was celebrating his pay-out.

Spooked extrapolates from that tragedy a creaking edifice of a plot. That involves hapless Kevin Jones (Hobbs), who buys as part of a computer job-lot some used floppy disks just crammed with sensitive international banking records. It takes Kev's mate a minute or so to figure they show arms deals, the CIA, and long-time account holder Mr O.B. Laden.

Holding out for a finder's fee, soon Kev finds himself being harassed by beefy men who wear sunglasses after dark.

Justifiably but unconvincingly paranoid, Jones turns to journalist Mort Whitman (Cliff Curtis), who, of course, wants to broadcast and be damned but can't get the story past his superiors.

Whitman also frequently turns up as on-screen narrator, an intrusive visual gimmick and curious proof that if a good story tells itself, then Spooked hasn't got one. And it certainly telegraphs how it's all going to end.

It does come with some oddly memorable touches: Hobbs' awful Taxi Driver "You talking to me?" tribute with an air pistol, all part of a performance that does him no favours; Pork Pie star Kelly Johnson's return as the caricature "Spook"; Vincent Ward's cameo as one of the bank's powerbrokers; and somewhere in there is a thinly disguised crusading pinstriped politician named "Monty Churchill".

But its post-September 11 trappings aside, Spooked still feels like a throwback to those early information age thrillers, when saving all that stuff on those floppy disk things seemed pretty nifty, and even earlier - to a time when many an unloved and unremembered New Zealand movie owed its existence to a tax break. Spooky.

CAST: Cliff Curtis, Chris Hobbs, Miriama Smith
DIRECTOR: Geoff Murphy
RATING: M (offensive language)
RUNNING TIME: 93 mins
SCREENING: Village, Hoyts cinemas