I’ve heard this movie described as a “21st-century Hawaiian Goonies,” and there’s definite truth to that, but I don’t think it’s a bad thing. There’s room for multiple films about a raggedy collection of kids hunting for long-lost treasure, and every kid deserves to see characters who look like them going on that sort of adventure. Finding ‘Ohana is fun, exciting, and full of heart.
New Yorkers Pili and her older brother Ioane are disappointed to be leaving home for the summer to visit their grandpa in O’ahu (they’re missing out on fun things back in Brooklyn! Grandpa has a landline!), and when their mom realizes how much their grandpa is struggling financially, it looks like their stay might not be so temporary. When Pili, a geocaching enthusiast, finds an old journal with the promise of lost colonial gold, she gets it into her head that she can help her grandpa and get her old life back if she just follows the clues to the treasure. She enlists the help of nerdy neighbor Casper, leaving Ioane and local girl Hana to go after them and make sure they don’t kill themselves.
Yes, all the beats are there. The impending financial crisis that threatens to upend the kids’ lives, the convenient journals/map to an even-more-convenient fortune, the booby-trapped cave, and more. And among the character archetypes, we’ve got a scrappy treasure hunter, a overly-prepared nerdy friend, an annoyed older brother trying to put a stop to the whole thing, and a responsible older girl that the older brother makes eyes at. You’ve definitely seen all this before, and while The Goonies is the strongest comparison, it splashes in the waters of plenty of family-friendly adventure films.
But it’s also a ton of fun. Pili is smart, gutsy, and single-minded to a fault, getting the others into trouble through her determination to see the quest through. She and Casper, with his giant backpack of supplies, make a delightful odd-couple pair. Pili and Ioane argue constantly, but there’s love there, too, and other the course of the adventure, we see how much they care about each other. Hana proves herself to be bolder than she might initially seem, and her knowledge of Hawaiian history and cultural traditions comes in handy. At different points in the film, each kid gets a chance to step up and shine, taking turns being the hero or the one to save or inspire one of the others.
In among the enjoyable humor, the fun action sequences, and the neat puzzles, we also get a nice display of Hawaiian culture. We’re treated to a taste of local ghost stories, and the adventure includes nods to religious traditions and colonial history – even the existence of hidden European gold means something different in a group of mostly-Hawaiian kids in O’ahu than it does to a group of mostly-white kids in Oregon. And Pili and Ioane tracing their roots to Hawaii while growing up in New York makes for an interesting dynamic too. It’s revealed that Pili learned Spanish back in Brooklyn because she got tired of correcting people’s assumptions that she was Puerto Rican, and Ioane spends much of the film rejecting his name, which no one back home knows how to pronounce. It’s a bunch of little things woven into the bigger narrative of kids going on a wild adventure, adding dimension to the characters and giving respect to the land they come from, which is really well done. Like I said, it gives Hawaiian kids an entertaining movie of their own, and it exposes other kids to a culture they’re probably not too familiar with.
All the actors playing the kids are new to me, but they all get the job done quite well: they’re quick and funny, they play well off of each other, and each digs deep when the situation calls for it. Kea Peahu and Owen Vaccaro are a blast as Pili and Casper, and Alex Aiono and Lindsay Watson hold it down as Ioane and Hana. Kelly Hu does a nice job as Pili and Ioane’s stressed mom, and Branscombe Richmond provides a strong grounding presence as their grandpa. There’s also a fun recurring bit of Pili recapping stories from the journals/speculating between the lines, with Chris Parnell and Marc Evan Jackson (Shawn from The Good Place) reenacting her narration Drunk History-style as the European explorers. Delightfully, the film also feaures a cameo from Ke Huy Quan, who played Data in The Goonies.
Warnings
Scary moments for kids, lots of “don’t try this at home,” some gross-out humor, mild language, and thematic elements.
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