Good For Nothing
A good old-fashioned Western - what is the most important ingredient?
How about this? A fairly uncomplicated conflict between good and evil or right and wrong - at least as it exists in the moral context set up in the movie.
Once you’ve got this, you throw in plenty of horses, some stirring music, stubble-faced gun-toting men in hats, some respectable women-folk to look after the young‘uns and distract the stubble-faced men, and plenty of western-style scenery, including tracks for steam trains, ramshackle towns with saloons full of piano music, whiskey and wild, wild women.
Good For Nothing is written and directed by Mike Wallis. It is the first film he has directed but he has worked for Weta Digital for nine years. His film has all of the necessary ingredients - and more - but that essential good versus evil conflict is conspicuously missing.
The “hero” is a ruthless killer and kidnapper whose main motivation in the story is to seek some medicinal assistance for a sexual performance problem he encounters when trying to rape the heroine. The people he encounters (and either maims or kills) are not much better than him and mostly not the natural representatives of goodness. “The Man” is played in true laconic cowboy style by Cohen Holloway (Boy, Eagle vs Shark).
The object of his attention (and I use the phrase deliberately) is Isabella Montgomery (Inge Rademeyer). Isabella is a young woman who has come out from England to stay on her uncle’s ranch. She is kidnapped by The Man in the course of an armed robbery and the rest of the story is dedicated to an armed quest for erectile dysfunction assistance.
Poor Eliza is carted all over the territory (played with mute but stunning beauty by Central Otago). As she goes along, she is forced to tear more and more material from her undergarments to make bandages for herself and The Man. Miraculously, a kind of bond develops between the implausibly laconic kidnapper and his plucky victim.
They are forced to flee from a jokey and self-destructive kind of posse seeking revenge and a bounty until The Man’s injuries force them to stand and fight in a canyon. The Man’s injuries include those resulting from a number of arrows shot into him by an aggrieved “Indian”. Some time later, they are heroically removed by himself and by Eliza (he couldn’t reach the one in his back). In the course of this western-style, do-it-yourself surgery, The Man rediscovers his manly vigour and only a very serious gunfight prevents him (I assume) from having to decide what to do with this rediscovered virility.
Having sidestepped any suggestion of a moral dilemma, the story sees Eliza delivered (late and only partly dressed) to her uncle’s ranch by the kidnapper. Maybe he has been redeemed by the extraordinary amount of suffering he has suffered (and inflicted). Maybe he hasn’t been redeemed at all. In the end I didn’t care.
Westerns require clichés. I have no argument with that, but there has to be some kind of point to the clichés. Wallis certainly gets plenty of mileage out of the real-life difficulty of hitting anything you aim at with a hand gun. The film also establishes the value of being able to count to six. In the end, though, Good For Nothing isn’t broad or funny enough to be a parody and it’s not deep enough to be taken seriously.
I really liked John Psathas’ stirring and evocative score, performed by the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra. The landscape is stunning, of course, but the film is certainly lengthened by the amount of time spent admiring it. The Kingston Flier has a cameo role, too.
New Zealand films don’t have to be uniformly worthy, dark, story-driven or anything else that marks them out as indigenous. It’s great that a Western has been made here by New Zealanders, if only because it will have provided precious employment for an awful lot of skilled people. The shame is, I think, that the film itself just isn’t that great.
Good For Nothing must be New Zealand’s biggest-budget western since the unforgettable Crunchy and Milky Bar Kid commercials. For all its production values and high-profile backing, I don’t think it improves on those minor classics.
Neil Wilson
