Attack The Block (Joe Cornish, 2011)

“I’m killing ‘em, I’m killing ‘em straight.“

With it’s besieged locale and rag tag bunch of defenders and anti-heroes, Joe Cornish’s debut feature harks back to John Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13 (1976).  Where it differs from it’s forerunner is in it’s honesty.

Attack the Block is a difficult film to watch mainly because it doesn’t neutralise it’s anti-heroes in the way that we are used to seeing.  Napoleon Wilson, Richard B. Riddick and Jack Carter have all killed and at least one of them is commonly seen as a psychopath but they are figures with a strong fanbase.  Where they differ from Attack the Block’s Moses and his gang is in their concessions to the audience.  They carry out actions that allow us to like them; Wilson won’t leave a man behind and neither will Riddick whilst Carter is on a quest to save a family member.  There is a sense that their actions are redemption for previous lives and so the films in which they appear give us a cosy moral permission to cheer on the bad good guy; that is the fraud of the anti-hero.

Attack the Block doesn’t do that.  At the start of the film the gang mug a young nurse and later, when they and her join forces, the closest they come to any kind of understanding that they might have done something wrong is a twinge of guilt when they discover that their victim lives in the same block.  There is no real growth just a blindness to anything outside of their own selfish understanding.  Moses is a real anti-hero and so consequently, the film needs much more threat to get the vieweronside with these guys, a level of danger that it sadly just does not have…

…but honesty is a virtue and any film that questions a genre also nudges it forward slightly and is worth watching.

Attack the Block is available on DVD.

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