Eagle vs Shark
Director: Taika Waititi
Writer: Taika Waititi, Loren Taylor
Cast: Loren Taylor, Jemaine Clement, Joel Tobeck, Brian Sergent, Craig Hall, Rachel House, Taika Waititi
Seen on: 22.6.2025

Plot:
Lily (Loren Taylor) works in a burger joint and the highlight of her day is whenever Jarrod (Jemaine Clement) comes in. She always hopes to take his order, but it never happens. When she hears that he is throwing a “dress as your favorite animal” party, she decides to crash it to finally get closer to him. It works, and when Jarrod announces that he has to go back to his hometown to finally get revenge on his high school bully, Lily accompanies him. But their relationship is still on very rocky ground.

Eagle vs Shark is off-beat and quirky in a very engaging way, but it fails a central point: it didn’t sell me on the relationship between Lily and Jarrod.

Eagle vs Shark is Waititi’s first feature film, and while it already shows a lot of what I have come to expect from him as a director, especially his sense of humor, it also shows that he didn’t get it right the first time and still had a way to grow. I think, an older, more experienced Waititi could have made it something along the lines of Dinner in America, but here he doesn’t get the balance between humor and characters right.

The problem does not lie with Lily though. She is a beautiful character, weird, vulnerable and very much herself. She gets to grow, from fawning to holding her own and standing up for herself. Taylor gives a wonderful, layered performance that keeps us rooting for Lily every step along the way. The problem is that rooting for Lily meant, for the largest part of the film, rooting for her to kick Jarrod’s butt and leave.

Jarrod reads as on the autistic spectrum (as does Lily, by the way), but that is not the problem. The problem is that for 95% of the film, he is an ass towards Lily and his character growth, when it finally comes, is too little, too late in my book. He does have funny moments, but we never really get to see his vulnerable side with regards to Lily, and that makes the romance fall flat on its face. In the end, when we get the happy end, it doesn’t really feel happy.

The film is short and well-paced, with a host of quirky characters (and a great supporting cast as Jarrod’s family), so it doesn’t really get boring. But it doesn’t quite work, either, unfortunately.

Summarizing: well, we know Waititi did better later.