DVD--Shank

or: Gangs taking over the world. Woohoo.

One word to sum it up: Dull.

Shank was described as a 'film made for the youth generation'. Great. I'm obviously now too old to be considered as a 'youth'. In fact, a lot of the people in the 'youth generation' have been shown by this movie that they are not actually youth. Because, in short, Shank isn't a very good movie. And, to be honest, it's a very hard movie to like. I've seen many bad films in my lifetime, but no movie has ever pissed me off. That was until I saw this movie. That was probably because I don't ever want the contents of this movie to come true.

'2015. The gangs have taken over.' Such a daunting tagline for a movie. Well, the gangs have taken over, yes, but all they do is run around annoying other people, getting into fights with aggresive chicks on a bus and eating food straight out of the can. It is an interesting world that Shank takes a look at, but it is just the kind where all the rich people have been taken out and London is run by the stereotypical less well off people. So really, all you could possibly expect from it is a whole lot of swearing and a whole lot of people grabbing each others throats. The story that goes with this new land is one that is often told: avenging a brothers death. When one of the guys from a gang of survivors gets killed by a rival gang, his brother goes out with the rest of the gang to get revenge. Kids stuff.

It doesn't matter how many ways you could put it, the dull storyline within this film would have never worked since we've seen it hundreds of times before. But it was interesting how the makers of this tried to breathe life into it. Mo Ali, a music video maestro, obviously made a well-educated attempt at making a youthful film. He incorporates a very hip and young techno soundtrack with some fast and choppy direction techniques to make this appealing to the young folk. Unfortunately, his attempts are quite annoying. The music sounds exactly like everything I hear at school from people blasting it out from their phones. Yeah, it may be good for that, but it just doesn't work for the whole film. And the direction. Golly. Sometimes you just have to use things in moderation. Yeah, I like fast visuals and choopy editing and whatnot, but I would have rather had it done little by little instead of through the whole damn thing. Because, no matter how 'artsy' it is, slow motioning and fast tracking a whole sequence of irrelevant dancing for ages isn't my type of fun.

This is, unfortunately, British film making at it's absolute worst. While it tries to serve as propoganda for youth being more powerful than they actually are, it just shows, again, how ignorant we are. So, rather than being a film for the youth generation, it just annoys the crap out of the youth generation. The dialogue, too, is shonky, but thankfully, that is shafted thanks to all the sequences of highly stylized sequences of stuff. The cast is basically a whos-who of hot young Brit things. There were a few people from 4.3.2.1 in there, along with the beautiful Kaya Scodelario, who played Effy in Skins. Her role is small, but very shouty. Nothing really matters about this film, though. It seems to go by in a blur, since everything is so awful. There's no story to speak of as it is practically incoherent. And the end is pretty cheesy. I imagine that this film is just Eastenders, but in the slums with younger characters.

THE VERDICT: Shank is an awfully dull film, with painful direction and characters and dialogue.

What I hoped for:

What I got: