Tearaway

Teenaged Ska (Matthew Hunter) is going nowhere fast. He's dropped out of school, has a dead-end job as a garbage man and does a sideline in petty theft with his best friend, Andrew (Mark Pilisi). He lives in a shabby house in run-down neighborhood with his older sister, Fran (Rebecca Saunders) and two younger siblings; their mother is dead and their father is a hopeless drunk. Fran has started working for local tough-guy Jay Ryder (Peter Bland) — she says she's got a job at a sauna parlor, but Ska suspects, correctly, that she's hooking. And on top of everything else, local gang leader Flak (Pevise Vaifale) has a beef that goes back to when he, Andrew and Ska were all kids, and he's always trying to provoke a fight. One night, as Ska, Andrew and some friends are hanging out downtown, Flak stirs up trouble and the police suddenly materialize. Ska's friends scatter and while Ska is hanging out on a rooftop, he spots a group of toughs trying to rape a girl in an alley and intervenes. He also offers to drive the grateful Stacy (Kim Willoughby, of the NZ pop band When the Cat's Away) home, only to be humiliated by her wealthy parents, who are having a swanky party and treat him like dirt under their feet. But Stacey seeks Ska out, and agrees to help extricate Fran from Ryder's clutches. Ska's posse descends on Ryder's high-end brothel and busts up the joint while looking for Fran; they escape, but pay the price later when Ryder sends his goons to teach them a lesson. Ska and Stacey cook up one last plan to get back at Ryder by disrupting a concert he's promoting, but can they ever escape their own pasts?

The New Zealand locations and the story's relatively subtle racial underpinnings — Flak and Andrew are Maori, while the lighter-skinned Ska is simultaneously mocked as too white to be a brother and shunned by snobby white people — make this cliched picture about alienated youth more interesting than it might otherwise be. leave a comment --Maitland McDonagh