Hmm. Whispers are that No 2 has not had the opening its people were hoping for.

Local fillums don't always attract the audiences they deserve, and in the past those just deserts might have been zero so heinous were some. But Toa Fraser's No 2 should have cinema tills overflowing.

In a paid-for review, I could only say a few words of praise, but I suspect it's far better than worthy nonsense like North Country , the well-meant but doomed River Queen, obvious-from-the-trailer pap like Fun with Dick and Jane, and overproduced junk like Memoirs of a Geisha. It's funny, and warm, and kind of real.

Given more space, I would of course have had to mention the dull as well as the shiny. I could have said that it's occasionally overwritten, some of the acting has that slightly mistimed Shortland Street quality, and that montage sequences at times looked like an insurance commercial. But overall it's terrific.

Now box-office it's absolutely no way to judge a film, but it's what production companies live or die on. So when I heard that the opening numbers for No 2 might not be as flash as expected - and they were right to expect good returns - I had a horrible thought. What if people weren't going to see it because it's a 'Polynesian' film?

Now I'm one of the keenest to climb into a pic if it's a closed box of deep and meaningful cultural artefacts, inaccessible to all but the finest, most aware minds. But right throughout No 2, it never occurred to me that this was anything but a Kiwi – horrible term – family, recognisably us, if a little browner and larger than some.

See it. And not something else.