Five feral youths take on Critters in a south London housing estate. That must have been writer-director Joe Cornish’s pitch for Attack the Block, an alien invasion B movie in which a young newly-qualified nurse, Sam (Jodie Whittaker), is first mugged by the youths, the leader of whom, Moses (John Boyega), is aged 15, then fights alongside them. Cornish is a comedian best known for the Adam and Joe show, which featured movie parodies where the main characters were stuffed animals.
The disappointment here is that the action is played mostly straight. Humour comes from “street” responses to the appearance of “a monkey crossed with a dog” and then a bunch of hairy beasts with day-glow blue fangs and no eyes. Occasionally, there is a knowing play on a movie line: “I am too high for this shit” or a tautology: “What’s the weed room?” “It’s a room with weed in it”.
For the most part, Attack the Block is kids attempting to take on the Charles Band-inspired aliens – a late 1980s rip-off of Gremlins – with knives, baseball bat, water soaker and a samurai sword.The kids are portrayed sympathetically, as if they are Cornish’s target audience, although anyone who has ever been mugged by a teen gang may not empathise quite as much as the director intended. Nick Frost turns up as the stoned keeper of the aforementioned weed room.
Aliens ending up in south London, somewhere near the Oval tube station, are no more explicable than those that crash land in the mid-West, as they do in Critters, – the main point of reference. That Critters is not currently available on DVD certainly works to the film’s advantage.Produced by Nira Park, Attack the Block does not reach the dizzy comic highs of her previous work with Edgar Wright, Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz.
The film lacks a really outrageous alien attack, something both funny and scary. Frankly, you are surprised there is not more interaction between other residents of the 19-storey tower block where the action takes place and the killer fur-balls crawling up the walls.
There is a good reason that French spy drama L’Affaire Farewell has been awaiting a British release for over a year. It is deathly dull, at least for the first hour. Nominally, it is based on true events, how (according to the film) in 1981 a KGB colonel, Grigoriev (Emir Kusturica) fed secrets to a French engineer (Guillaume Canet) undetected. This subsequently led to the compromise of every Russian agent in America and Europe until the Americans sold him out.
The shame of the affair is that the former Soviet Union knew every secret that the United States tried to protect. The surprise is how Grigoriev, who was responsible for vetting all the documents gathered by Soviet spies, was never suspected by his colleagues, including the army of secretaries who worked for him – not that we see him doing much work.We don’t see the engineer do any engineering either. When we first meet him, he is taking his wife to see their young daughter show off her unicycle skills at a local circus. His first meeting with Grigoriev is apparently set up by the engineer’s boss, who has contacts in French intelligence. The colonel apparently hoped for a professional contact, not this amateur, but went on to pass the engineer reams of documents, including plans of the White House.
There are numerous scenes of Grigoriev not getting through to his teenage son, who, as well as a love for the British rock band Queen, shares his father’s dislike of Leonid Brezhnev. The engineer tries to get Grigoriev to defect, then offers him money. All the KGB man wants is some French poetry, a few Léo Ferré albums, a bottle of champagne and a “Johnny Walkman” for his kid. Fred Ward turns up as President Ronald Reagan and plays him as a film studies professor, lecturing on clips from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Reagan is none too keen on François Mitterand’s Communist ministers and seeks to influence the composition of his government. Mitterand refuses – this is a rare French movie that presents a recent French president as a hero.
Nominally, the film credits Grigoriev with ushering in glasnost. In the early 1980s, the Soviet was effectively broke. The film’s thesis is that, with its agents uncovered, it would take 10 years to catch up with the American Star Wars programme; hence perestroika and the rest. Carion only generates tension in the last half hour, when Grigoriev is finally captured and the engineer makes a dash for the Finnish border. The preceding scenes plod. We learn a few things about living in Soviet-era Moscow. You should acknowledge the men tailing you and be nice to them to avoid suspicion. Making love to your wife on a regular basis also prevents you from being a target for honey traps – all bedrooms were bugged.
Willem Dafoe pops up as a CIA man who demonstrates that the Americans, although sending Grigoriev to his death, operated for the greater good. Kusturica chews scenery as the KGB colonel, but Canet is a cipher, no more than the sum of his glasses and beard.
