Movie Review: The Legend of Baron To’a

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The Legend of Baron To’a is the first feature film from director, Kiel McNaughton, and markets itself as an action-comedy without managing to find stability in either throughout its 108-minute runtime.

The plot of the story centres on Fritz (Uli Latukefu), the grown-up son of legendary Tongan wrestler Baron To’a (John Tui), who returns from a new life in Australia to sell his childhood home. Arriving in his old neighbourhood – with the vast majority of the story localised to one cul-de-sac and its residents – he instantly finds himself as a magnet for drama and trouble.

On the first night of his return, his father’s championship pro-wrestling belt is stolen by the vibrant gang living at the end of the road. After trying to negotiate its return through commonsense, he learns the only way he can retrieve the family heirloom is to fight everyone into ‘reclaiming’ the title belt.

Along the way, he develops a relationship with his next-door neighbour Shavaughn Ruakere, combats local law enforcement in Xavier Horan, and rediscovers his roots through the mentorship of Nathaniel Lees and childhood friendship of Fasitua Amosa.

Overall, the film is terrible. There are highlights, which I’ll get to shortly, but I can’t sugarcoat that, as the film falls over itself time and again with a laundry list of disappointments. Latukefu portrays Fritz as a strange Sherlock Holmes archetype, writing on windows with a marker about concepts which his character should be perfectly capable of just remembering.

He’s a physically dominating presence with zero consistency; one minute he’s jumping unscathed through glass windows and defending himself with the fluidity of Bruce Lee, the next he’s seemingly too exhausted to dodge the weakest of punches and negotiating with the audacity of a second-hand car salesman.

As Fritz is the driving force behind the film’s narrative, it’s the only thing worth going into detail about, but every issue with the film falls onto a simply abysmal script – I don’t know exactly what they were trying to get at with comedy but I’m sure we weren’t supposed to burst out laughing at the absurdity of Ruakere casually quoting T.S. Eliot over a garden fence during a highly constructed talk about ‘the cyclic nature of journeys and finding yourself’.

On to the positive. If you were to look at the film as not an action-comedy but a strange hybrid of a pro-wrestling narrative orchestrated in the world of Kung Fu Hustle, there’s certainly some value in it. Tui, Amosa, and Jay Laga’aia all give individually excellent performances, Lees is relegated to making awkwardly obvious puns and putting on his best Rocky mentor face, and there are a handful of action moments which are absolutely glorious.

But there just isn’t enough consistency in this to feel as though it was planned to be this way; the strange blend of hyper-eloquent Shakespearean dialogue, caricatured profiling of everyone to the laziest of extremes, and plot-armour-plot-fragility never imply any real stakes in the characters, and we assume that regardless of what happens throughout the story, all of our characters will have a happy, feel-good ending.

But the ending of the film leaves more questions open – such as what will happen the morning after – and this is where I have to just blind myself into believing the idea was to create a farcical narrative of an old wrestling storyline. Maybe this is what they were going for, but regardless, it never fully commits to anything; it’s part romance, part drama, part action, part comedy, part fantasy-farce, but ends up tasting like a bad Long Island Iced Tea instead of George’s Marvelous Medicine.

Ultimately, it’s a story that feels overwhelmingly manufactured, but without ever pushing itself to the extremes necessary to make it something uniquely special or memorable; it’s a film with all the bravado and potential excitement of a pro-wrestling match, which unfortunately pulls its punches in a way that removes all magic and enjoyable authenticity.

Dir: Kiel McNaughton Starring: John Tui, Uli Latukefu, Shavaughn Ruakere, Nathaniel Lees, Jay Laga’aia, Xavier Horan, Fasitua Amosa

~Oxford Lamoureaux

Oxford Lamoureaux
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