ATTACK THE BLOCK
Written and Directed by: Joe Cornish
Starring: John Boyega, Alex Esmail, Leeon Jones, Franz Drameh, Simon Howard, Luke Treadaway, Jumayn Hunter, Nick Frost
At the LA Film Festival, Edgar Wright, Executive Producer on ATTACK THE BLOCK, read a letter from Joe Cornish saying that the film was an ode to creature features like CRITTERS and GREMLINS, gang movies like THE WARRIORS and a tribute to the part of London in which he grew up. The film not only manages to be all of these things, but is scary, violent, hilarious, and has the frenetic pace of a booming underground London club.
ATTACK THE BLOCK centers around Moses (John Boyega, in a fantastic debut) the leader of a group of teenage hoodlums in South London. When something falls out of the sky one night and attacks him, does he run away? Hell no! He and his friends go after it and beat the hell out of the creature and parade it down the street back to the Block (the apartment complex they live in) to show it off to Ron (Nick Frost) their local pot supplier.
That’s when things start to go crazy. It turns out that the small grey creature Moses killed was only the first in a wave of aliens invading South London, and the grey creatures’ compatriots are bigger and scarier, with rows of glow in the dark teeth. On top of all this, Moses ends up getting himself inadvertently into hot water with Hi-Hatz (Jumayn Hunter) and on top of running away from aliens, he and his friends now have an angry drug dealer after them.
What I really love about ATTACK THE BLOCK is the joy you can feel from Cornish. He completely relishes the hard edged and utterly badass attitudes of his characters, but isn’t afraid to delve deeper than the gangster image they project, and by the end of the film we understand that these kids are just like the kids in any of Spielburg’s early Amblin films, or like Joe and his friends from Super 8, and perhaps that the place they live in and the way society, including some of the other characters, view them. Remarkably, John Boyega is able to bring all this depth to Moses with very little dialogue at all, which is a testament to his talent. I really hope that Boyega has a long career ahead of him.
Apart from that, Cornish was able to really stretch his dollar (or pound, perhaps) on this film, not only by keeping the bulk of the action centralized, which adds to the mounting tension of the alien threat, but it forces all the character to deal with each other. Additionally the creature design works to his advantage, since they are so dark that they can’t be distinguished from the shadows they lurk in, adding to their suspense and menace and in an age in which there are entire films that are digitally created, all of the creature effects and stunts were all done practically.
If you can’t tell already, I’m definitely adding my voice to the chorus of #blockheads who really love this movie. If you are a fan of Edgar Wright’s films, of well written and paced action and enjoy laughing loudly and hilarious and violent things, then check this one out as soon as it ends up at a block near you.
Trust.
5 out of 5
ATTACK THE BLOCK screened at the LA Film Festival on June 22nd. The film opens in the US on July 29th in select cities and will open wider after that.
