As musicals go, this hip hop effort from Penny Woolcock pulls no punches, but doesn't quite emotionally connect. A cocky young guy owes money to someone higher up the chain, the story follows him through the mean streets as he desperately tries to get the money to pay this guy back. Along the way he connects with a child who wants to get onto the first rung of the ladder, the three mothers of his various children, his own mother and grandmother in a snapshot of the two sides of life at the bottom of the heap.
One of the main problems is that unless you are really "in" the hip hop world, a great deal of the dialogue is incomprehensible. The action is easy to follow, but the subtleties are lost on most people over the age of thirty, which down-grades the moments of poignancy considerably. And Flash is such an unlikeable character! At one point he even steals back the jewellery he gave to his girlfriends. Another problem is that the intentions of the big set pieces in the film are so telegraphed that you can predict with pin-point accuracy what is going to happen before it does. The moment that the little side-kick drops the gun on the sofa, you know how the confrontation in the multi-storey is going to pan out.
I really wanted to like this. It really is okay to have a main character who is unlikeable, but you need something sympathetic to draw on and there really wasn't anything to hook into. Even as a bold statement the film doesn't quite catch it, because there's too much predictability in the outcome. I came away feeling mostly dissatisfied. Disappointing.
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