The other day I heard that Flight of the Conchords were going to write a movie – and the next morning I woke up with the complete plot in my head. So hey, Bret and Jemaine? If you ever happened to read this, it’s all yours – obligation free…
The plot
Jemaine’s crazy cousin, played by Taika Waiti, arrives in New York. He is the direct descendant of famed warlord and haka-writer Te Rauparaha.
Bret and Jemaine have landed a gig recording advertising jingles for a beer company, and cousin Taika tags along. Taika is annoying Jemaine, so to keep him happy, the evil ad executives agree to take him out and show him New York.
They treat him to an American football game.
The home team is losing – and the distraught evil ad executives are fans. But Taika knows what to do. To the team’s astonishment he leaps on to the pitch and performs his great-great-great grandfather’s haka…
…cut to after the game, where the evil ad executives are amazed at how the home team went on to pull off an amazing last-minute win.
They eagerly steer Taika to a nearby bar, where they ply him with drink to discover his secret. Dazzled and inebriated he signs over the intellectual property rights to Te Rauparaha’s powerful haka.
The evil ad executives decide to relaunch the beer as “haka lite”. They discover that Jemaine is also ‘a Maori’ and want him to write a haka jingle. He’s torn between ambition and selling out.
Non-Maori Bret is kicked out of the deal. He returns to New Zealand to attend a ‘wudding’.
* In New Zealand, Bret gets drunk at the wedding and ends up in a spa-pool with an enormous bridesmaid – and after, she tells him she’s pregnant. He wants to escape back to New York, but his fatherly obligations mean he must stay.
* In New York an incredibly cute girl is pursuing Jemaine. She has been hired by the evil ad executives as a honey-trap to convince him to put the power of the haka into the jingle.
* Elsewhere in New York, Taika is being hunted by the shadowy Man from Uncles, a hitman hired by his relatives, who have heard he signed away the intellectual property rights to their treasure.
Bret is involved in all strands of these plots via Skype, carried around on a laptop. At one point Jemaine risks his life to save Laptop Bret from the Man from Uncles even though Bret could have just logged off.
This incident heals the rift between them, and Bret confides that his new heifer of a girlfriend is pregnant – and what’s worse, she’s already six months pregnant – even though they’ve only been dating a week. Jemaine explains that he can’t be the father and Bret returns. (From the next room – he was in New York the whole time, attending the wudding, and hooking up with the bridesmaid, via Skype).
The film then reaches its crisis point:
The three lads must reclaim their intellectual property to save themselves from being killed by the Man from Uncles, but if they don’t write the haka jingle their exit clause in their contract with the evil ad executiveswill cost them everything.
Just when there seems to be no hope there’s a game-changing cameo – ala Sam Elliott in The Big Lebowski – from UN expert on indigenous rights, ex Prime Minister and Minister for Culture, Helen Clark (who is shopping at a New York fruit stall).
The boys explain their problem, and Helen Clark delivers the solution: to reclaim their intellectual property, they simply have write and copyright a new version of the haka that’s substantially different to the old one.
At this point incredibly cute honey-trap girl genuinely falls for Jemaine and joins them, as all attractive honeytrap characters must. Together they write a new electro-drum and bass haka which storms the charts.
They make just enough money to have nothing left over after paying their exit clause for refusing to write the haka-jingle. They hand over the rights to the new haka to the mysterious Man from Uncles. Taika returns to his homeland wiser for his brush with New York. And Bret and Jemaine are back where they started…
Ends
