Far North

When a Tongan-Australian gang does a deal with one of the biggest drug cartels in the world for half a ton of meth to be smuggled to New Zealand shores, a $500 million fortune awaits them. All they have to do is pick up the drugs. The only problem - they're really bad at this: the four-man crew invades the small beachfront town of Ahipara, in the Far North, burning money and acting anything but low-key in this remote piece of paradise, while waiting for the Chinese smugglers to arrive by sea. But as the Chinese smugglers get near shore, their drug boat breaks down. Stranded with 500kg of meth and no way to unload it, Hong Kong sends a fixer to Ninety-Mile Beach. A new plan is hatched: buy a boat, stage a fake funeral at sea, grab the drugs, and save the stranded smugglers. Reality: the fixer crashes their boat the moment it hits the water. And the fun's just beginning. Enter local fisherman Ed and his aquarobics-teaching wife Heather - unwittingly brought in to help, they soon realise something's rotten. Who are these funeral faking, boat crashing strangers, and why are they so hot for a boat trip? While the stranded Chinese smugglers slowly starve, the gang's lies - and Ed and Heather's doubts - only grow. The stakes become clear as the gang gets more desperate by the day and a second $100k boat turns up. For this ordinary Kiwi couple there's only one way forward: forced to help the gang pursue an epic payday, all the time hoping for an opportunity to thwart them and survive to tell the totally ridiculous tale. Despite everything, the gang eventually do get their score. The deal is done, they're about to escape, and it's only luck - criminal stupidity - and Heather and Ed's quick thinking that finally leads the cops to a caravan creeping along a back road with half a billion dollars' worth of meth on board. Far North is a saga of screw-ups, as everyday people strive to foil an international drug cartel's largest-ever drug deal in the Pacific; the cops' trip themselves up; and gangsters chase a payday with zero discretion - leaving a trail of wreckage you can see from space.