Movie Review: Attack the Block
Invasion of the midnight black bugbears (why doesn’t spell check call me on that word?)
This movie is one that my friend Dave has been asking me to see and review. I kind of regret not doing it sooner. It wasn’t great, but it was a lot better than most of the movies I have reviewed recently (cough cough Conan the Barbarian cough cough) and I enjoyed watching it. Generally a good experience.
There is one issue I have with this movie, and it is one that has plagued me ever since I started watching Guy Ritchie films: I have a very hard time taking gangsters and gang members with British accents, especially Cockney, seriously or at all threatening. A Cockney accent makes me feel kind of warm and fuzzy, and having some guy spout out hard core gangster dialog just makes me giggle. The disparity is like learning that your sweet grandmother is a five star general and listen to her order men to their deaths. It’s just funny.
I guess the disparity stems in part from having lived around some actual bad ass guys (did I mention I have lived in Oakland for 10 years now?) and seeing them all the time in American movies. Also, the relative rarity of guns in the UK makes crime over there seem somehow less threatening and more amusing. I know for sure that this is just a messed up perception on my part, and if I were on the wrong street in South London I would probably get my ass handed to me pretty quick by guys who sound a lot like Benny Hill. Nevertheless, there it is.
By the way, I do take Irish accents to be pretty serious, but that might be from some of my older family.
Anyway, Attack the Block. Since it is almost out of theaters and wasn’t in a lot of them in the first place I am going to assume most of you will not see it and feel a little free with spoiler, so you might want to skip this next paragraph if you plan to seek it out. Anyway, a gang of youthful hooligans mugs a young girl. During the course of their crime a meteor crashes into a nearby parked car. It contains a very small (pretty much Gremlin sized) alien who attacks the leader of the hooligans. They chase it, kill it, and walk around London carrying it like a trophy. Turns out the little one they killed was a precursor for a swarm of others, all the size of a black bear with midnight black fur (cough cough easy CGI cough cough) and glowing green teeth. They are after anyone who has had contact with the first alien (there is a reason for this, but I won’t spoil that much). 
Alien-esque hijinks ensue. Guys get killed. Aliens get killed with a number of improvised weapons. The mugging victim ends up teamed up with the kids. Some annoying pre-teens show up and do annoying stuff. (Alien image courtesy of the science fiction t shirt category)
The stars. Independent film. One star. Nick Frost. One star. Reasonably believable story. One star. The main group of young teenage hooligans rang really true and acted pretty well for young actors, especially the main one, John Boyega. One star. Story conclusion was well done and hardly smacked of deus ex machina at all. The characters worked hard for it. One star. The girl was really cute, but they didn’t try to crowbar in any kind of dumb romance to gum up the story (this is why I love independent films). One star. The dialog, once you got around understanding all the Cockney, was well done and had some really funny lines. One star. Impressive production values for an independent. One star. The one comic relief character was actually comic relief without being freaking annoying or changing the tone of the film. One star. Total: nine stars.
The black holes. Alien invaders without any kind of technology. Basically it was like being invaded by a bunch of bears. One black hole. Two little kids kept surfacing and harshing my buzz by being annoying. One black hole. After a while the fact that the kids managed to kill aliens over and over again with basically kitchen knives and the like gets less and less believable. One black hole. That’s it. Three black holes.
I have a couple things in the irksome category. For one, the CGI wasn’t the best I have seen lately. However, I am not going to ding them on it as it is an independent and I have seen really polished Hollywood CGI delivering total crap to us lately. Also, throughout most of the movie I couldn’t help but think these invaders could only pull this off in England, as if they landed in the USA our glorious nine guns per ten citizens ratio would have put paid to melee dependent aliens toot sweet.
So a total of six stars. Nice film, and it’s always good to see a film come out of something other than the Hollywood orifice. If you can still catch it in a theater I recommend you do so. If not put in on your NetFlix.
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