![]() ![]() His relationship with Moses has real depth to it and never goes down the route you expect, helped by a powerful showing from Tui.įor a film where there are several jumps in time, the pacing is almost perfect. It is a magnetic performance from Ryan, whose unnerving silences are broken up by him throwing his weight around when the film hits its most dramatic. And all the while Damage has to wrestle with his dedication to the gang and his saturation in violence, the tattoos across his face almost feeling like brands that commit him to this life. There is a decaying state of humanity that pervades the film as it progresses, the biker gang descending into a bickering pack of wolves. You won’t look away even when relatively little is happening, in case you miss the next sorry chapter of Damage’s life. Writer- director Sam Kelly’s feature debut makes for a compelling watch. Through flashbacks to his childhood and adolescence, you see how others disregard his welfare and wellbeing in favour of their own, and how he ends up as a hollow monster arguably worse than any of his old enemies. Savage focuses on Danny (Jake Ryan), or Damage as he is referred to in adulthood, and his time as a mob enforcer for a biker gang known as The Savages, run by his long-time friend Moses (John Tui). This is a slow, twisting knife of a film that dwells on animalistic behaviour as much as it does the tortured soul of its protagonist. Don’t go in expecting an action-packed adventure with bullet ricochets and one-liners. ![]() It is the violent underbelly that Savage throws you into, recalling true stories from the country’s biker gangs across a thirty-year period. New Zealanders themselves would be among the first to tell you that it is not as simple as that. There is a preconception that New Zealand has somehow emerged into the new century as a kind of heavenly utopia. ![]()
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