Taika Waititi

If you had to pick the two Hollywood directors who have been the most over-exposed in recent years, many people would opt for two idiosyncratic and hitherto likeable figures: Wes Anderson and Taika Waititi. The reason opinion has cooled on both filmmakers, however, in the past couple of years is that their work — which has often been excellent in the past — has become so stylized, and so constant, as to be exhausting. Anderson’s most recent movie, Asteroid City, was greeted with sighs and weariness, despite being a smash at the box office, and Waititi’s much-delayed picture about soccer, Next Goal Wins, has premiered at the Toronto Film Festival to general yawns of “predictable” and “seen it all before.

Before Taika Waititi achieved his current state of half-ironic, half-irritating ubiquity, he made small, often brilliant films. One of the most notable ones was the 2014 New Zealand comedy horror picture What We Do in the Shadows, which he co-created and co-directed with Flight of the Conchords star Jemaine Clement. Horror comedies are notoriously tricky to get right tonally, but the film — which admittedly leant far more heavily on the comedic aspects — was a modest box-office hit and became yet another step on Waititi’s stroll to Hollywood dominance.

The career of the New Zealand director, writer and actor Taika Waititi is beginning to resemble an especially demented fairground attraction. An Oscar winner for his screenplay for Jojo Rabbit, a Nazi-themed black comedy that will make people fight in bars over perceptions of its quality (or lack thereof), he has since gone and taken the Marvel dollar. Unlike so many of his fellow Marvel directors, however, Waititi has fought to keep his work personal and distinctive. In the case of 2017’s riotous Thor: Ragnarok, this worked superbly well. Despite his working as a director-for-hire with no screenwriting credit, it was a hilarious and hugely entertaining space adventure that remembered to be fun, unlike so many other Marvel pictures.