UK Release Date: 19-09-2011
Price: £24.99/£19.99
UK Certificate: 15
Director: Joe Cornish
Country: UK
Distributor: Optimum Home Entertainment

You’d have thought that a film about aliens invading a South London council estate on Fireworks Night would offer all sorts of opportunities for absurdist comedy and/or wicked satire. Attack the Block, though, simply stages a straightforward confrontation between its hoodie heroes and its things from outer space, with some crude humour thrown in. The result is disappointing; a horror-comedy that lacks both bite and wit, so anodyne at times that it feels as if it’s been plucked from the schedules of CBeebies (although it’s undeniably swearier and bloodier, and has a nice little role for Nick Frost as the neighbourhood weed dealer).

Apart from not being very funny and not being very scary, the film is hobbled by two other major problems that it never quite recovers from. The first lies with its main characters. I watched the film days before the recent riots that shook London and other parts of the country, and even then it was hard to muster much interest or sympathy for these violent teenage hoodlums. Perhaps it’s just me, but given that the first things we see this gang of hoodie-sporting thugs do is mug a nurse at knifepoint and then beat an alien creature to death, I doubt many other viewers will warm to them much either. I spent the first half of the film actively cheering on their imminent comeuppance at the claws of the space things.

The second problem is that the latter – shaggy, black wolf-gorilla things with no eyes but attractively illuminated jaws – are about as menacing as the Honey Monster. During the film’s climactic scene, the other half walked in and exclaimed: “Oh, they’re so cute!” (She also recently informed me in hushed tones that “they’ve banned Hungry Caterpillar 2”, but you can trust her on this one).

I suppose one can take some comfort in the explicit moral of the piece, as banged painfully into the thick skull of 15-year-old black gang leader Moses (yes, he will indeed lead his people to freedom, although he won’t taste it himself): actions have consequences. Actually, this needs to be qualified a bit: If you mug a defenceless nurse, the chances are you’ll get away with it; but if you whack a female alien monster, her homeys will come and merk you, and that rather speedily (yes, I had to look up ‘merk’ on urbandictionary.com).

There’s another life-lesson (or political gesture) here too, which the second half of the film spells out at length: that victims will forgive their attackers if faced with a common and greater threat – like aliens, or Evil Tory Cuts, perhaps. That’s what the nurse (a sort of proxy for white, Guardian-reading, middle class viewers wondering what on Earth their kids are watching) does. She turns out to live on the same “shitty council estate” as her muggers. We’re all in it together, then – black, white, NHS key workers, teenage gang members, poor little Charlie Gilmour and Uncle Tom Cobley and all.

It’s an idea embodied in the image of Moses dangling precariously from a Union Jack at the film’s end, after he’s saved the world, and before he’s been carted off by the ‘feds’ (I know, I know, this isn’t the US, and what’s wrong with Filth, Plod or Old Bill? Perhaps David Starkey should have a word with these feckless young purveyors of gangsta-speak). “They always arrest the wrong people,” opines one block resident, but after recent events I’m not so sure that even the residents of Tottenham or Hackney would agree, let alone ‘angry of Tunbridge Wells’.

To his credit, first-time director Joe Cornish (of ‘Adam and Joe’ fame) elicits good performances from his youthful cast, has a nice feel for his Sarf London locations and, with cinematographer Thomas Townend, delivers a film that’s, visually speaking, full of colour and fizz, with some nice action scenes.

There’s a scene toward the film’s end – in which we see a child’s Spider-man duvet on Moses’s bed – that is both subtly chilling and rather touching, suggesting an uncomfortable truth about these kids’ lives. It’s too little, too late, and too clunky, perhaps, but it adds a momentary flash of illumination that almost made me forgive much of what had come before.