Review - Attack the Block

So here I am just cruising around the old inter-web watching videos and listening to music. From time to time I like to read forum posts because trolls are the best flametastic entertainment you can get without paying a dime. Up until this point ATB was not on my radar because Sci Fi comes second to horror for me and the British slang/dialog can be hard to follow for the average Yankee. At a pretty popular site which will go unmentioned I took in a war of words that had spilled into nasty arguing and name calling, all over a movie called Attack the Block. It seems some other yanks had a hard time enjoying it due to the British dialog and some UK fans were pretty offended. A twat comment tossed one way and an asshole fired back. So what is the big deal with this damn movie?!?! Off I go full speed to find some trailers and legitimate press in hopes of locating what has caused this all too common virtual war.

The trailers did not do much in the way of causing drooling or an obsessive need to seek this movie out. So I decided to add it to Netflix for a viewing whenever the damn service decided to mail out the disc. This flick should have been streaming as well as 90% of the current catalog but that's another fight for another time. So we open with a mugging by a group of teenage thugs who will become the main characters in this film. Overall I found it very hard to empathize with any of these characters and I was a trouble maker as a teen. When your characters come and go so quickly it can be very hard to establish the main character much less any of the others in this gang. Who had the grand idea of waiting till the end to establish the protagonist? I get doing some things to string the viewer along to build the caring and empathy, which is the norm, and did not happen here until almost the credits. If this film had to ride on the merits of character interaction and development, it would have been a sinking ship within the first 15 minutes. Luckily we have some SFX and humor to fill the obvious character void.

Ok, so we are mugging this meek mouse of a women and a creature blasts into a car like a missile at 300 miles an hour. We might have something here. Well we might have something, but lets have the kids rob the car before fully investigating the disturbance. Huh? Um ok, lets track said creature down because he scratched the British 50 cent's face. Once we have beat this thing into submission it's time to head to the main drug dealers place and figure out what it is. This whole part kinda bugged me and did nothing more than introduce more characters you will not care about down the road, AKA king dealer and his cronies.At this point you may be thinking man this dude really hated the movie. I beg to differ. The chase scenes were entertaining along with the fight scenes. At more than one point I did feel the camaraderie that movies like Toy Soldiers so happily brought to us back in 1991. The you know we may not be soldiers but we will fight to take back what is ours. In the case of Toy Soldiers it was boarding school and ATB had well ... the block to take back.Nick Frost will always be a very funny man and without him in this film I do feel a lot of humor would have been lost. The whole king drug dealer scene and what not would have seemed stiff and forced just to add the grit to these young boys if not for Mr. Frost and his fat stoner persona. Personally I did not care for the glowing mouth apes that the creatures were portrayed as. I get Sci Fi and enjoy it but really I wish these had been something a little more akin to humans in some form. I am not sure why but I was left saying that more than one time.Overall the movie was worth watching and I did enjoy it for what it was. I wish the world did not assume that the more film festival awards/nominations adorned on the cover the better it will be upon release. Was this a success ,yes. Was it a box office killer up against movies like transformers and the like when it comes to sci fi? No.Did anyone else see this and really like/hate it?Does my review make you want to kick me in the nuts? Regardless of answering yes or no please feel free to leave a comment or death threat. I am a fan of both.

originally posted by contributor Christopher Young