Frightfully Thrilling Block Truly Out of the World
Sam (Jodie Whittaker) didn’t think her night could get any worse. After being mugged by teenager Moses (John Boyega) and his gang, the trainee nurse manages to get back home to her London apartment block only to have him and his group suddenly right on top of her doorstep. You see, their home has for some reason been targeted for alien invasion by a gaggle of black-haired dog-like creatures with a fondness for human flesh, and with the police stupefied it’s suddenly up to them to save the day.
John Boyega, Jodie Whittaker and Luke Treadaway in Attack the Block
© Screen Gems
Next thing Sam knows, she’s joining forces with Moses and his crew, as well as the complex’s resident drug dealer Ron (Nick Frost) and his number one client Brewis (Luke Treadaway), to stop these monsters before they’re all overrun and viciously devoured. Attacker becomes savior, villain becomes hero, and before the night is done they’ll all have made Hell pay or have punched a one-way ticket to the afterlife, which one it will be no one is quite sure.
Attack the Block is the best popcorn flick of the entire summer, and I mean that as one heck of a gigantic compliment. Popular BBC television personality Joe Cornish makes the jump to the big screen as both writer and director of this hugely entertaining B-movie genre hodgepodge, crafting a fitfully funny and a breathlessly exciting homage to Assault on Precinct 13, Gremlins, Rio Bravo, Night of the Creeps, Escape from New York and just about everything else in-between. It is smart, quickly paced and imaginatively inspired, and by the time it was over all I wanted to do was watch the darn thing again.
Made with a fraction of the budget of say Transformers: Dark of the Moon or Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, what Cornish has come up with is pure pulp entertainment on a grandly intoxicating scale. Keeping the focus on the characters, most notably Moses and Sam, he manages to ground things in a realistic setting that’s refreshing and natural. As crazy as things become, as silly as some of the bits of humor and comedy can be, as over the top as the action gets, because the characters work everything they’re doing ends up working as well, the weirdness just a natural extension of the plight the forced-to-be heroes suddenly find themselves facing.
Newcomer Boyega has the makings of something special. At the start of the film he’s a thug, a brute and a ruffian who does and says things that immediately put me off. But as the movie continues the teen’s built up artifice slips away and the semi-shy, emotionally constipated boy begins to emerge. He’s fighting for things that cannot be easily explained, and while he knows he’s going about trying to care for his family and for his friends in the wrong way he’s not altogether sure what other options are open to him.
Boyega makes Moses real, his evolution a startling transformation from ruffian to child to man extremely effective. He grows up in the course of this night, learns what real loss is, what true sacrifice entails, coming to an understanding with those closest to him, as well as to those like Sam who he as hurt, that doing the right thing might not always be the most profitable but it is the most rewarding. It’s a star-making turn, and still in his teens I can’t wait to discover where this talented young actor goes from here.
Cornish stages things magnificently. Tension ratchets up yet the laughs keep coming; suspense is generated but the smile on my face never disappeared. The movie builds organically and in a natural rhythm, all the pieces slipping one into the other crafting an elegantly cheerful interstellar urban thriller without seams and with very few unseemly edges. I love the fact that Cornish doesn’t take prisoners and just because he’s set up a group of characters the viewer can relate to and like that doesn’t mean they will escape evisceration. Anxiety is palpable, the sense that anyone can be alien dog meat ever-present, and while the jokes and gags ease the tension somewhat there is an undying feeling of pervasive dread that blissfully never vanishes.
In the end, the most important thing to know about Attack the Block is how gosh darn fun it is. This is one of those movies where I sat there in awe as to just how much I was enjoying myself. I was laughing and shrieking and squirming and giggling with the rest of the preview audience, the whole thing making me feel like a kid in a candy store who had just been handed their favorite treat free of charge. Cornish has delivered the summer’s most invigorating supercharged frolic, and to call it anything less than out of this world would be a bloody man-eating crime.
- Review reprinted courtesy of the SGN in Seattle
Film Rating: êêê1/2 (out of 4)
Additional Links
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Interview with writer/director Joe Cornish and actor John Boyega by Sara Michelle Fetters
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