"Way back in 2006, from the upmarket opulence of Notting Hill, David Cameron encouraged us to ‘hug a hoodie’, but we’ve grown used to seeing teen thugs — in movies from Death Wish to more recent efforts such as Eden Lake, Harry Brown and F — as defiantly unlovable.
Now, it seems that with the arrival of slick French films District 13 and District 13: Ultimatum, and the amateurish, home-grown Anuvahood, we’re in for a glut of pictures sentimentalising hoodies as misunderstood victims who need only a nastier set of miscreants to make them look charming by comparison.
Attack The Block strikes a refreshingly happy medium, neither demonising nor glorifying them. It clearly springs from real-life experience, after the 6ft 3in writer-director Joe Cornish, a middle-aged, public school-educated South Londoner, was annoyed and embarrassed to find himself mugged on his home turf by some 12 to 15-year-olds.
The film this event inspired starts off on bonfire night with impressive political incorrectness.
Five Brixton hoodies — four of them black — mug a white nurse at knifepoint. Their all-too-common street-crime is interrupted by a more unusual event: an invader from outer-space crash-lands on a nearby car. The immediate reaction of the gang is to kill the interloper, which looks like an unappetising cross between Sepp Blatter and the beast that burst out of John Hurt’s chest in Alien.
They then parade its corpse triumphantly around their council estate, and celebrate by sampling the wares of the local drug-dealer (Nick Frost) who operates from the 19th floor of their tower block, and fancies himself a naturalist because he watches so much telly.
‘Well done, lads,’ he says. ‘You’ve discovered a species hitherto unknown to science and you’ve kicked its head in!’They fantasise about instant celebrity on Britain’s Got Talent, but then spot more creatures dropping out of the sky: ‘It’s raining Gollums!’
They have enough teenage testosterone to go after the incoming monsters, but when the new arrivals turn out to be bigger, blacker and considerably more lethal than they are, they turn tail and hide in their block, which they share with the nurse (Jodie Whittaker) they so recently mugged.
She is believably under-impressed to meet them again, while they can’t understand why this professional carer doesn’t care for them.
‘You swear too much, man!’ one of them complains. ‘Boy, you’se tetchy!’ grumbles another.
The gang leader (John Boyega) constructs a half-baked conspiracy theory, arguing the government must have bred the aliens in order to cull troublesome black people.
Nor does he respond well to being told he’s being paranoid, saying: ‘There are too many things out to get me, get me?’
Gradually, however, the cowardly gangstas, their stroppy victim and a clueless graduate pot-head from far-away Fulham (a funny turn by Luke Treadaway) learn to work together in order to fight the common enemy.
There are inevitably echoes of Shaun Of The Dead fighting off that unwelcome incursion of zombies in Finsbury Park, but the notion of uniting classes and races to resist a common enemy goes back to the heyday of Ealing comedy.
This is not so much a parody of sci-fi monster movies as an affectionate pastiche.
There are enough laughs to qualify as black comedy, but it’s also scary enough to be thrilling. It’s in the tradition of An American Werewolf In London, Gremlins and Tremors, and as enjoyable as any of them.
The special effects are outstanding for a film that cost only £8 million.
I especially enjoyed the infectiously rhythmic, driving music by Steven Price and Basement Jaxx, reminiscent of low-budget horror maestro John Carpenter’s scores.Cornish has a great ear for South London slang, and though he makes no bones about his young characters being ignorant and wrong-headed, his kindliness shines through.
You end up feeling these youngsters may not be all right, but they are redeemable. The nurse who is, despite her temper, the moral centre of the movie, ends up acknowledging her former muggers have ended up protecting her. They grow from being monsters into neighbours.
Although Frost and Whittaker are familiar faces, the piece is held together by the fresh and unaffected performances of the youthful first-time actors, especially Boyega and Alex Esmail.
I even ended up caring when not all of them made it through to the end of the picture.
Budgetary limitations mean the film lacks the scale of more lavish offerings, such as District 9, and the action climax could have done with the extra dimension that another few million pounds might have brought it. Occasionally, the inexperience of the young actors does show, and not every line reading rings true.
With my grown-up, socially concerned hat on, I was also a bit disturbed at the junior characters’ irresponsible, potentially lethal and highly imitable misuse of fireworks as weapons.
The accents and slang may make this a hard sell outside the UK, but it deserves to become at least a cult hit. It’s easily the most entertaining British monster movie since Shaun Of The Dead.
Cornish, best known as a comedian for The Adam And Joe Show on TV, clearly has talent, as does debut cinematographer Thomas Townend.
Running through the film is the same message that underpinned Jamie Oliver’s dream school on television — that too many teenagers have been brought up without understanding the consequences of their anti-social actions. The point is made, but without a hint of hectoring.
Untypically for a British movie, the pace is excellent, it’s thoroughly cinematic, and there isn’t an extraneous scene.
And, although the film has a sense of humour, it doesn’t fall into the trap of making its characters do unbelievable things in pursuit of cheap laughs.
I had a lot of fun watching it, and I’m not its target audience. A lot of people under 25 are going to think it’s brilliant, innit!"
The Guardian
Back in 1995, Mathieu Kassovitz gave us a brutal inner-city
classic called La Haine (Hate). Now British comedian-
turned-film-maker Joe Cornish has created something from
much the same world. But this good-natured and endlessly
likable debut could as well be called La Gaiété, or L'Espoir,
or indeed L'Amour. It's a terrifically funny, gutsy action-
adventure comedy about invaders from space attacking a
council tower block in south London. The extra-terrestrials,
with their hairy lupine bodies and glowing blue fangs, make
aggressive planetfall right in the middle of a council estate,
to the astonishment of a petty gang of lairy teens who have
just mugged a defenceless nurse for her money and
jewellery, and are about to move up to the big time, selling
drugs for a paranoid gangland leader holed up in his
reinforced strongroom, growing weed under halogen lights.
But this gang of bullies on BMXs must find redemption by
teaming up with their victim and saving Planet Earth.
As well as excitement and laughs, Cornish provides some sharp social comment on the subject of aliens and
alienation. Now, there are many who will feel they have consumed enough hand-wringing analysis from the
concerned commentariat about aggressive youths in Broken
Britain controlling their turf, and yet as scared as babies of
moving anywhere beyond these "ends". Cornish tackles the
same idea but with a light touch and a cheerful,
unfashionably optimistic belief in a happy outcome
somewhere along the line. His sci-fi urban pastoral is also a
satirical fantasy. What if enemies or opposing groups were
suddenly confronted by a common foe? Might they not
discover common ground that should have been cultivated
anyway?
Jodie Whittaker plays Sam, an overworked, underpaid
nurse who is walking home from the tube station, talking to
her mum on the mobile. She finds herself surrounded by a
crew of five teenagers, led by the hard, impassive Moses
(John Boyega). They demand her valuables and threaten her
with a knife. She is white; they are black and mixed-race;
she speaks RP English and they speak London patois-slang,
the language in which the rest of the movie is to be
conducted. Moses and his mates don't realise it, but Sam
lives in the same place they do – the awe-inspiringly gaunt,
grim tower block that looms into the night sky like a
marooned spaceship. Just as trembling, terrified Sam hands
over her possessions, the extra-terrestrial assault begins.
Furiously, Moses attacks the invader and becomes as
terrified of these interplanetary beasts as Sam is of them.
Yet Sam and Moses have to team up to fight the aggressor.
There is tremendous supporting work from Jumayn
Hunter (last seen in Paul Andrew Williams's Cherry Tree
Lane) as drug dealer Hi-Hatz, Nick Frost as his laidback,
avuncular second-in-command Ron, and Luke Treadaway as
the appalling trustafarian Brewis, always trying to be street-
cred and speak like the guys from the block – his witty
performance is a reminder that there is a certain type of
middle-class white man who should never attempt to use
the word "jokes" adjectivally, to mean "funny". It's easy to
watch a film like this and wonder … when are the grownup
white actors going to take over? The answer is never. With
tremendous assurance and utter lack of condescension,
Cornish puts his young cast playing the council-block kids at
the very centre of the action. He directs them tremendously
well and they reward him with performances of charm and
energy that carry the film.
Cornish intelligently uses his medium-range budget to
suggest, rather than show the aliens themselves, and succeeds in creating a genuine action picture from which
comedy naturally arises, rather than a series of sketch-show
gags we are expected to buy into as drama. When Sam is
simmeringly angry with Moses, and tells a police officer that
she has no intention of being forced out of her home by a
bunch of thugs and bullies, she could almost be in a gritty
social-realist picture.(Attack the Block looks a little like Michael Winterbottom's film Wonderland.)
Later, she must search around Moses's flat while talking
to him on the phone; she comes across what appears to be a
little kid's bedroom with a Spider-Man duvet on the bed.
Between them, Cornish, Whittaker and Boyega create a
situation of poignancy and force when Sam asks Moses if he
has a baby brother, before the penny drops. "How old are
you?" she asks. "Fifteen," says Moses, blankly. "You look
older," says Sam wonderingly, and Moses's artless reply of
"Thanks" is given something heart-wringingly vulnerable by
Boyega.
Attack the Block draws on the classic science-fiction model such as Independence Day and the siege drama – Carpenter's Assault on Precinct 13 – but there's also something very innocent and English here, something reminiscent of the 1947 Ealing comedy Hue and Cry. Cornish has made an impressive debut: in his early comedy career, he made his name by pastiching and taking the mickey out of Hollywood movies. But this doesn't look like a pastiche; it looks like the real thing.
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