STAR RATING: ***** Saturday Night **** Friday Night *** Friday Morning ** Sunday Night * Monday morning
Sam Peel (Noel Clarke) has settled down with girlfriend Kayla (Shanika Warren-Markland) and two children, and has put his unsavoury past behind him. But he is thrust back into it when his younger brother Royston (Daniel Anthony) is gunned down while performing at a live show. Flash new crook Daley (Jason Maza) wants him to work for him, and has joined forces with Sam's old enemy Uncle Curtis (Cornell John) who has his own agenda. Sam tries to stay on the straight and narrow, until an horrific act plunges him back into the underworld he'd tried so hard to escape.
Noel Clarke obviously felt, eight years after the last instalment Adulthood, that the series needed to be rounded off a little more than it already was, and so we have this, we are assured, the final part. Some backstage politics, shall we say, have clearly played their hands here, and so we see the Moony character missing altogether, and Sam mysteriously settled down with his girlfriend from the last film?!?, and of course Adam Deacon's Jay completely absent following the well documented real life spat that spewed up between him and Clarke. Personally, I didn't miss his hyper street kid antics this time round.
While it still packs a powerful emotional punch or two, somehow the raw, gritty, uncompromising nature that characterised the first two films just isn't as evident here. Those films (the first one especially) were from the mind of a young man who had grown up in this unfortunate world, and who gained acclaim by recklessly writing down and screening all the types of stuff he'd seen, and as a result made a film that was 'as potent as a shot of vodka in the morning' as one tabloid review memorably put it. With such a large space of time between this and the last film, the cast (those still in it) and the material with them feel like they've grown up a bit, and this time it all seems to be played more for laughs, even during intense, dramatic scenes, especially from Arnold Oceang's Henry.
That aside, the story all feels cobbled together without the strongest narrative flow and there's an air of predictability about a lot of it that doesn't go unnoticed. It's still worth seeing, though, a grown up, more seasoned ending that those from this generation will feel they've shared the journey with. ***
