Jojo Rabbit

“Don’t get into the Nazi stuff,” Taika Waititi’s deadbeat dad tells his son, the eponymous protagonist of the New Zealand-born actor-writer-director’s sophomore feature (2010), gesturing to a swastika he once carved into the wall of his childhood bedroom, the remnant of a reformed punk’s youthful exploits. Hindsight being 20/20, it’s almost as if the recent Marvel laureate is cautioning himself to not glibly trade in fascist iconography if he can help it, but with his admittedly inventive riff on Christine Leunens’ World War II novel , Waititi delivers on his character’s dark prophecy, with predictably dicey results: in , Waititi dives headlong into the Nazi stuff, pulling out an enervating human-interest story is a satire at all, as opposed to a lazy fable about letting the boys of the Gestapo be boys (so long as they eventually learn to love their neighbours), it is the rare one lacking in both stinger and target.