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Attack The Block

★★★★★

Directed by: Joe Cornish

Written by: Joe Cornish

The whole of why I love Attack The Block can be summarized by the inclusion of the following exchange, initiated by Pest, a teenage member of a gang in South London who become embroiled in a battle to stop a horde of toothy aliens from overrunning their housing project:

Pest: I’m sh*ttin’ myself, innit’, but at the same time…
Moses: What?
Pest: This is sick!

In this brief exchange we see with both sadness and delight why the coming generation isn’t the doom of all of us. Because while we may rightfully fret that their acquisition culture of entitlement and narcissism and cynicism is a threat to social constructs, we have to admit that if an alien attack or a zombie invasion were to take place, these are the little snots we want on the front lines, well versed in Call of Duty tactics and Ninja Turtle battlefield confidence.

Attack The Block takes place in a small neighborhood where the gang of teenagers robs a young woman named Sam (played with a pleasant matronly resignation by Jodie Whittaker) on her way home from work. As the robbery is in progress, a car is demolished by a falling extraterrestrial object and a squealing creature wounds the gang leader, Moses (played with striking confidence and growth by John Boyega), who vows revenge. The gang track the alien while Sam flees, and soon they produce a corpse and decide to bring it to a local pot grower, Ron (a stoned Nick Frost), for identification.

At Ron’s, Moses is tapped by the local druglord, Hi-Hatz, to work for him as a dealer but the kids soon discover that there are more aliens arriving, so they hype themselves up to defend their homes. In the process of fighting the creatures, who have glowing blue teeth and fur but otherwise seem to absorb rather than reflect light, Moses loses Hi-Hatz’s drugs and is reunited with Sam such that he must evade the angry druglord, fight the aliens and convince Sam to trust him for protection.

The overall progression isn’t startlingly original; plenty of other monster pictures have followed a similar formula. Where Attack The Block really succeeds is in making what other movies would have as disposable one-scene extras the central protagonists and developing each character and the relationships between them all while still managing to create an atmosphere that is simultaneously exciting, frightening, funny and just plain cool.

This is such an enjoyable movie because there are so few disposable characters which gives the action—and even the horror—a certain emotional heft that is often lacking from genre pictures like this. And the screenplay is masterful at creating prejudices within the audience that it is then able to subvert. More to the point, it achieves something remarkable by making an anti-hero into a legitimate hero and having the heroism come off as cooler than the grittier, darker assumptions up front.

I kind of expected this to be sort of a B-grade movie, but I was surprised that the special effects were really well done, with very little CGI and I had no problem with immersion at all. If I have any complaint at all it might be that the thickly accented and heavily slang-infused dialogue is a bit hard to decipher, such that I ended up watching with subtitles on. Even then some of the slang is lost on my old-fogey USian frame of reference, but the point is clear enough with context and it’s hardly a reason not to see Attack The Block. And in fact, I can’t think of a single reason not to see Attack The Block.

from No Thief Like a Bad Movie — February 21, 2012 at 11:18AM