Based on a section of a forgotten novel from 1999 called Go! by Simon Lewis, Jet Trash is a film out of time. As old hat as Human Traffic and less cool, Jet Trash’s cast still bring a lot of energy to a clapped out hipster-caper flick. Drugs, gangsters, hot girls & guys, palm trees, sped-up, slow motion cameras, and happening soundtrack deck this film out to the gunnels yet there’s still nothing new to see here, so this may only draw in Robert Sheehan (FORTITUDE) fans, and he does have a few. Two friends Lee (Sheehan) and Sol (OSY IKHILE – DAPHNE) are hiding out from a British drug lord after they ripped him off. Their game is up when Lee’s old girlfriend Vix (SOFIA BOUTELLA – THE MUMMY) tracks them down. A lot of other things happen but they’re all diversions and meanders that all lead back to the main road. Pretty to look at Jet Trash is a nicely acted diversion that you’ll stuggle to remember after a few hours.
I do remember meeting the author when he was promoting this book via a signing to a bookshop I was an assistant manager at back in 1999 (Orpington). It’s the only event I ever had a hand in organising, that’s why I remember it. I bought some onion bhajis and and few samosas to go with the wine and about seven members of the public turned up. The book came along in the wake of Alex Garland’s The Beach and I only remembered it when this film came on my radar. I wonder if Mr Lewis remembers the event. Probably not, but I do remember him being really friendly. So after all these years it’s interesting to see that somebody else somewhere remembered the book and crafted a film from it.
Nicely, if blandly done, this curry needed more spice, less lime. For fans of Goa, Robert Sheehan and one of the people that were at the Orpington signing event.
4.5 out of 10 – A standard caper flick with a beautiful setting, pretty good actors which is crying out for a touch of originality. Strait-jacketed and old fashioned, this won’t be remembered. Shame.
Cast: Jonathan Readwin, Sean Power, Eline Powell, Alice Lowe, Kenneth Collard, Eric Lampaert, Anthony Cozens, Javone Prince, Francesca Papagno, Ben Goffe, Dannielle Brent , Ricky Champ, Yana Yanezic with Howard Marks and Billy Boyd
Howard Marks: Killer Bitch, Dirty Sanchez, Human Traffic
Billy Boyd: White Island, Ecstasy,Pimp, On A Clear Day, Master & Commander – The Far Side Of The World, Child’s Play 6 (voice), The Lord Of The Rings: The Return Of The King, Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship Of The Ring
Charlie Bewley: Renegades, Hammer of the Gods, The Vampire Diaries (TV), Breaking Dawn 2, Soldiers Of Fortune, Breaking Dawn, Like Crazy, Eclipse, New Moon
That’s one of those ambiguous titles. Is ‘The Incident’ the thing which happens to the film’s heroine halfway through the film, or is it what the hero does near the start? Or does it refer to Tom Hughes buying the world’s most expensive pizzas? Which, seeing as he’s bought them in a backstreet in Huddersfield, is quite an achievement.
We open with Joe arriving at a pizza place on the mean streets of Kirklees. Although he gets some pizzas, the fool also manages to inadvertently make use of the services of Lily, a semi-random pizza-waitressing underage prostitute. We’re meant to believe (I think) that this error of judgement / gross stupidity spirals into an inevitable sequence of events leading to disaster, but that’s not really the case as (a) the film-makers have to fashion a series of (in)convenient coincidences to keep the plot going, and (b) divorcing this drip is probably the best thing his wife could ever have done.
Joe returns with cold pizzas to one of those improbably swish residences that are usually the preserve (in films) of media types, millionaires and (bizarrely) alcoholic police officers. Joe is an architect, his wife I’m sure does something equally middle class but I can’t remember, the point is they’ve got a nice big house seemingly constructed entirely of glass. Some desultory scenes follow, largely designed to show that these two are not long for each other. Then the coincidences begin to pile up. In a desperate attempt to discover whether she’s pregnant our heroine dives into a public toilet, but the next cubicle is soon occupied by Lily and a potential customer. A little later, the two women have a brief altercation on a railway platform, which Joe fails to notice despite being about three metres away. And so it goes on. (By the way, she is pregnant! Obviously. Women aren’t allowed in British films without the promise of a pregnancy and the peril that entails). Subsequently Lily winds up at the house and the really rather very good bit of the film happens, which I won’t reveal, but if this middle bit had been a short film then it might have been a much more worthwhile exercise.
After that things unspool in a standard fashion leading in leisurely fashion to the final possible incident which is based on the sort of reveal you get in TV crime dramas.
The central image of the film, with the two women, one in an alien environment, the other whose safety is being violated, is a strong one. But the film doesn’t know how to surround it. There are some incredibly, almost embarrassingly, lame attempts at showing the bleak side of life for the have-nots. Meanwhile the depiction of the better off couple feels even more fake, like the film-makers are trying to echo unhappy French characters from intense arthouse films like UN COEUR EN HIVER, just without the intensity or Frenchness.
I’ve rarely encountered a drearier set of protagonists. Even the supporting players (Noma Dumezweni criminally misused as a kind of general purpose social working medical police lawyer and religious counsellor) and extras exude boredom. Hughes, last seen by me in some godawful would-be army recruiting film, in which he portrayed a block of wood, is considerably improved. Up to a point. He conveys his character’s middle-class anguish by whispering. Alas, whispering is also his way of conveying joy, misery, frustration, confusion, boredom, and apprehensiveness. And although he does the ‘I’m lying through my teeth’ and ‘oh no I’m about to get found out’ physical actions well, his face is sadly less animated than his arms. Curiously the film doesn’t seem that interested in Joe’s predicament, which is fair enough – there must be more than enough stories about unwise prostitute-usage from the clients’ perspectives without adding dreary Joe’s tale to them.
This leaves Ruta Gedmintas to do all the heavy lifting and she’s pretty good at all the basic stuff: looking concerned, pensive, scared, ill, but she is unable to make us care about her dreary character. Similarly, Tasha Connor (as Lily) can do bored, vulnerable and sneaky (she’s clearly a good actress), but you just wish she’d go away and pester someone else.
Being a basically arty film, it’s all very slow, which looked at first like a good thing: it seemed to be building slowly and steadily to a crisis point, but then it just loped along after the incident at much the same pace, leaving the pedants in the audience (i.e. me) enough time to wonder at a few things. How does Annabel (as she’s eventually named well over an hour in) recognise Lily when it’s dark? How do the police catch her? Why does Lily refer to travelling to ‘the city’? (If the film’s set near Huddersfield, that means Bradford, Leeds or Wakefield, none of which are ever referred to as ‘the city’ by locals.) How speedy is British justice? At the start of the film our dreary duo are preparing for a party which still hasn’t happened by the time the British justice system has apprehended the miscreant and a victim/perpetrator meeting has happened. This film, like its main protagonists, seems to live in a protective cocoon, a world where criminals are caught, social workers aren’t over-worked, and the law works with maximum efficiency. This is a film which wallows in its own middle-classness and its middle-class-guilt, without ever bothering to actually consider any of the relevant issues.
True, if this had been some gritty vérité-style slice-of-life misery-fest, I’d probably be annoyed it wasn’t chirpier. But this really is the most cursory way of dealing with an issue, to the point where it feels like the whole child prostitute thing was tacked on simply to make the film more controversial/edgy/resonant/whatever. Instead of being a film about the ways an affluent society treats people at the bottom of the scale, THE INCIDENT is just a tourist’s eye view of poverty, a middle class guilt-tripping divorce drama with pretensions.
Review by Matt ‘eat the rich’ Pesci
WHAT HAVE I SEEN THAT ACTOR IN BEFORE?
Ruta Gedmintas: A Street Cat Named Bob, The Borgias (TV), Prowl, You Instead
Tom Hughes: London Town, Dare To Be Wild, 8 Minutes Idle, I Am Soldier, About Time, Cemetery Junction, Sex & Drugs & Rock-N-Roll
Tasha Connor: When The Lights Went Out
Noma Dumezweni: Dr Who (TV), Silent Witness (TV), Dirty Pretty Things
This is an interesting film. This gorno isn’t perfect, but it has got ambition and the confidence and an ounce of intelligence to get some rather good points across. In a way The Lesson teaches the viewer a thing or two about going into films like this with low expectations. This potentially rote little splatter flick turned out to be the product of a filmmaker that is committed to squirrelling an effective little allegory in the back way. It’s an allegory but I won’t tell you what for, but its nice that someone has really thought about the job at hand for once, instead of delivering yet another found-footage bore.
Well shot and directed by first timer Ruth Platt, this simple story tells of two brothers – the eldest Jake (TOM COX) who goes to work, whilst Fin (EVAN BENDALL) is still at high school age. Tom’s polish girlfriend Mia (MICHAELA PRCHALOVA) also lives with them in their council estate house. Fin hangs with bad company at school, and along with his best mate Joel (RORY COLTART) makes their English teacher’s Mr Gale (ROBERT HANDS – EASTENDERS) life a living hell. After a particularly bad day Gale, takes the two lads hostage and gives them both a lesson they’ll never forget.
The Lesson takes its time establishing the characters well-enough that although Fin is a turd, we know why he acts the way he does at school. It’s strange not to position the teacher as a figure of sympathy, rather its Fin who becomes this. Gale holds all the cards as he tests the two boys on their knowledge of English literature whilst doling out a set of grisly forfeits. Gale is presented as more complex too, he gets picked on, on a particularly bad day, so the fact that he snaps is given some weight. The only innocent in the story is Mia. She clearly prefers the younger brother’s personality, but is beholden to Jake because he has given her sanctuary from her own very real problems. So when Mia goes out to search for the missing Fin and Joel, Jake takes exception. It portrays most of the characters as bottom feeders, who are seen as soft for any act of kindness. Any lightness is crushed. The main characters are given flesh and blood roles, it’s just the supporting characters (who are mercifully few) who haven’t been coloured in.
The story spends time to build a good character dynamic, so it’s actually a shame that this turns into a gory horror spree at all, as it could have been something like The Goob or Dead Man’s Shoes. But even when it does it still works, all though it’s a little bit cartoonish at times. Sadly some of the lead performers are a touch wooden and the unknown cast, who have been gifted a half-decent script slip and slide. Uneven performances render the film unconvincing on occasion and because of this fact, the film suffers and becomes a missed opportunity. Better performers would have made this one to recommend. But as I said, largely it works. Another down point is the unbelievable consequence that takes place that results with Mia tracking down the boys’ whereabouts. Other wise The Lesson had a good ending and a satisfying coda. As downbeat as The Lesson is, is that its a story of greys, no black and whites. The director has a nice ear for a soundtrack, and a good eye for a shot, so hopefully we’ll see something else from her again one day.
6 out of 10 – Thoughtful and impressive gorno, which benefits from a good plot, script and several committed performances give this the extra gusto to make it way above average for this kind of thing.
WHAT HAVE I SEEN THAT ACTOR IN BEFORE?
Robert Hands: Eastenders (TV), The House of Eliott (TV), Grange Hill (TV)
Cast: Daniel Huttlestone, Dougray Scott, Nell Williams, Natascha McElhone, Anya McKenna-Bruce, Samuel Robertson, Jack Morris with Tom Hughes and Jonathan Rhys-Meyers
A wishful-thinking fantasy that throws real-life famous people into a fictional brush with the ordinary is what London Town is. We’ve been here with The Committments and Hear My Song. Anonymous non-famous person has a brush with fame and is star-struck when fame reaches out and pats them on the head. This time it’s Joe Strummer of The Clash (JONATHAN RHYS-MEYERS – MISSION IMPOSSIBLE 3) turn to get the re-imagining. He cameos in a tale of rote derring do, which sees Shay (DANIEL HUTTLESTONE – LES MISERABLES) as 15 year old who has a brush with the late 70s punk-scene when he runs into Vivian (NELL WILLIAMS) and follows her to some gigs and a record shop that stand in for London. Meanwhile he has to look after his 6 year old sister whilst his taxi-driver/piano shop owner father (DOUGRAY SCOTT – MISSION IMPOSSIBLE 2) recovers in hospital after a bad accident. Meanwhile, he becomes obsessed with his errant mother played by Natascha McElhone (SOLARIS) who lives down in London in a squat with a bunch of artists, hippies, and punks. She’s a bad mother who falls from mythical status to reprobate in a few predictable scenes.
And that’s London Town’s problem is it’s lack of authenticity. Beyond a good but empty performance from Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, this coming of age tale doesn’t miss a single cliched beat. The dialogue is too modern, people never spoke like that back in the 1980s, I was there. TV exec demands or lazy writing it still adds to the annoying pile of unimaginative story turns this takes. It lacks charm despite the best efforts of the young lead, Daniel Huttlestone, who was so good as Gavroche in Les Miserables.Nell Williams is rather flat as the punk kid with a secret, so the love affair has no spark. Dougray Scott scraps over whatever’s left but is largely sidelined in a slim role in a film full of wax dummies. The climax where Shay puts on a concert to save his dad’s shop – advertising Strummer as the headliner is dead-eyed and rushed. The scene has no spirit or life, and is over before it starts. I bored the law and bore won.
3.5 out of 10 – It’s an exercise in cookie-cutter filmmaking for people who don’t like originality in their films. A trip down memory lane for those that weren’t there. Punk purists would hate it. I bored the law and bore won.
Dougray Scott:The Rezort, Snatch (TV), Fear The Walking Dead (TV), Taken 3, Tiger House, The Last Passenger, Dr Who (TV), Death Race 3, A Thousand Kisses Deep, My Week With Marilyn, Love’s Kitchen, United, New Town Killers, Hitman, Desperate Housewives (TV), Dark Water, One Last Chance, To Kill a King, Ripley’s Game, Enigma, Mission Impossible 2, Gregory’s Girl 2, This Year’s Love, Ever After, Deep Impact, Another 9.5 Weeks, Twin Town, The Crow Road (TV), Soldier Soldier (TV)
Natascha McElhone: Mr Church, Believe, The Sea, Californication (TV), Romeo & Juliet (2014), The Kid (2010), Big Nothing, Guy X, Ladies In Lavendar, Solaris (2012), feardotcom, Killing Me Softly, Love’s Labours Lost, Ronin, The Truman Show, Miss Dalloway, The Devil’s Own, Surviving Picasso
Jonathan Rhys-Meyers: Vikings (TV), Stonewall, The Mortal Instruments, Albert Nobbs, The Tudors (TV), From Paris With Love, August Rush, Mission Impossible 3, Match Point, Alexander, Vanity Fair (2004), I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead, Octane, Bend It Like Beckham, Prozac Nation, Ride With The Devil, Titus, The Loss of Sexual Innocence, The Governess, The Tribe, Velvet Goldmine, The Disappearance of Finbar
A wonderfully nonsensical and mateurish crack at a twister, George Clark‘s third feature sees him in venture into Saw territory. Two vaguely connected men find themselves chained together deep in the forest. One of them is a school teacher, Andrews (ROBERT RENDER – THE LAST LIGHT) and the other is dim-witted teen, Kieran (ANTHONY BOYLE). They don’t know why they’re there or who is watching their every move.Each of them also has a revolver containing one bullet gaffer taped to their hand. contained in the latter half will only reveal spoilers. And although Onus should have been titled Anus, I won’t be mean and give away the end. I’ll just call it childish names instead.
A lot of ambition is on display here but alas the talent to pull it off doesn’t show up. The good aspects include a tasty soundtrack track and a reasonably good performance from the director’s ‘go-to’ lead, Robert Render. Unfortunately, the editing is sloppy, the sound mix is borderline terrible with much of the dialogue at the beginning of chapter two drowned out by background noise.
The plot has several gigantic holes (no spoilers from me) but how difficult would a gun gaffer taped in your hand be to remove? One of the points reliable on the success of the villain’s scheme is that nobody would try to escape. But bad plotting aside, much of the film has a plodding pace where it should have been fast moving and exciting. Instead, Onus feels like a chore and an exercise in how to finish a feature despite having no talent or dicernible idea how to make an action-thriller.
1 out of 10 – Slow with a badly-plotted story that tries to be different but just ends up being repetitive, derivative of similar thrillers, all with zero resources to achieve a satisfying end result. It took me four attempts to watch it all the way through. Not good.
Glenn Close: Guardians of the Galaxy 2, Guardians of the Galaxy, Albert Nobbs, Hoodwinked 2 (voice), Hoodwinked (voice), The Shield (TV), The Chumscrubber, The Stepford Wives (2004), Le divorce, 102 Dalmatians, Tarzan (voice), Cookie’s Fortune, In & Out, Airforce One, Paradise Road, 101 Dalmatians, Mars Attacks!, Mary Reilly, The Paper, The House of the Spirits, Hook, Meeting Venus, Hamlet (1990), Reversal of Fortune, Dangerous Liaisons, Fatal Attraction, Jagged Edge, The Big Chill, The World According To Garp
Anamaria Marinca: Fury, The Europa Report, 4 Months 3 Weeks & 2 Days
RISE OF THE ZOMBIE HOOLIGAN FILMS 