Film Review - Attack the Block

Why is it that the films with the best acting and most carefully-written scripts are always the ones with the lowest budgets, regardless of genre? Well I suppose not always, but still. Sometimes. And it's annoying.

This summer I watched a whole lot of action movies at the cinema, starting with Pirates of the Carribean 4, going through just about every superhero origin story you can name and ending with a cheerfully-ridiculous re-make of Conan the Barbarian. None of them were bad, exactly, not even Conan, but none save the surprisingly great X-Men First Class seemed to have had any particular effort put into their stories. Again, I liked all of them, but every one had the kind of script that would pass a creative writing class but wouldn't exactly make its author into the star pupil. They had lead actors who were basically coasting and collecting the big cheque at the end (Ryan Reynolds, Natalie Portman, even Johnny Depp, Harrison Ford and Daniel Craig) - not doing a bad job by any stretch, but not exactly going for awards. Nobody involved in any of these films seemed to really give a crap.

And then you have Attack the Block. I hadn't even heard of this thing, and I only rented it because it had a cameo from Nick Frost (of Edgar Wright / Simon Pegg fame). I rented it along with Priest, in fact, and saved Attack the Block 'til after the feature presentation, as a last minute thought before bed. I suppose I just answered my own question from the top of this page, right? But my point is that unlike the movies mentioned above (except X-Men, loved that one) this one was... not brilliant exactly, but it was something. Not a sequel or a remake or a concept - but a story.

That story sounds daft: this is a movie where alien monsters (which look exactly like the DVD cover of the movie Wilderness) land in a London housing estate and it's up to a bunch of semi-dangerous teenaged thugs to stop them, once they realise they are the ones being hunted. And Nick Frost appears in it, and it's written/directed by Joe Cornish from The Adam and Joe Show (one of my earliest memories of alternative comedy - they did crude, dumb sketches with Star Wars figures and plush toys, I loved it but I was very young. This was back when Channel 4 was good and... gave a crap. Hm.) So you'd be expecting a silly film here. A farcical parody, like Shaun of the Dead but worse. Or at least, that's what I was expecting.



But actually, I can't honestly say it's a comedy. It's funny, but not all the time, and only with the side-characters. Neither is this a horror, despite the Alien-like aliens who stalk our 'heroes' through their block of flats and the surrounding neighbourhood (more on this later) using all the traditional scary-monster horror movie tricks. And the aliens are not our focus, and there is real drama in there, so I guess we have to just call this a 'low-budget British sci-fi action film'. That's going to make it hard to recommend to people, which is a shame because it deserves to be seen.

The aliens in the film are awful. They are CG-made, cut-and-paste identical "big gorilla wolf motherfuckers" (I loved that line) whose presumably hairy bodies are so black that they appear like pure shadows (or indeed unshaded cartoons) with luminous cyan teeth. Despite the very unique and fun reason for them being here, and the scary, animalistic behaviour they exhibit, it is impossible to be scared by this effect. And any other low-budget British horror/ SF / comedy might have been ruined by this restriction, but not this one.

What makes this work is not the horror-style, the SF concept or the jokes, but the carefully-written characters and the cast of teenage lads who fill this film with some of the best acting you'll ever see in an action movie. Hell, in any movie - this is proper acting. I wonder how much they got paid for this, and then how much the cast of Thor got.

It's a simple basis, but deeper than you might think: teenage and mostly black gang members are running from alien monsters. But those teens (and the middle-class characters around them) are interesting, realistic and layered. And every one of them is a complex satire or social commentary. Aside from one or two smaller parts, none of these young people is wholly likable or loathsome. They're not there to lampoon or beg sympathy, but to represent a point of view. And each has a personality, too. I wish we had time to learn more about them, a feeling that came to me very strongly in the third act when we are given (slightly clichéd) glimpses into our lead, Moses' home. I wasn't expecting to care about him so much, and that really impressed me.


Incidentally, I don't mean to imply that the aliens chases are laughable, or that the comedy doesn't work. There is menace when the aliens strike, despite their appearance, and some of the comedy is brilliant. (This is too much madness to fit into one text, bruv!) And the two little boys following the gang around are particularly funny. But what so surprised me and so thrilled me here is the drama. It's obvious that Joe from the Adam and Joe Show really cared about these characters and worked damn hard at them. Same for the actors: Moses is played very well by John Boyega. I never quite hated that character, and never quite pitied him either. Brilliant.

This silly-looking film with drug-dealing, teen muggers fighting aliens is about something, and the kids are neither hilariously inept chavs nor lionised gangsters. They're a group of characters who almost never get a realistic portayal in film, and they're done very well. The movie is flawed, by the way, but there's something unique and great about it. Captain America was good, you know. I liked that a lot. X-Men, I think I mentioned, was great. So was Attack the Block.

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And did you know that Bucky, Captain America's sidekick, is so-nicknamed because his middle-name is Buchanan? And that my name is Buchanan and nickname is 'Buch' (pronounced 'Buck')? It's true! And on this site, I'm sort of the sidekick to an American! Spooky.