Gassed Up

Most certainly not perfect, I'm not convinced by it I won't lie, but... 'Gassed Up' narrowly does enough.

Making your lead characters criminals is always a brave choice, you're almost setting yourself up for failure from a film point of view. I'm personally cool with a movie's main lot not being total good guys, like 'The Fast and the Furious' is literally one of my favourite flicks ever, but it does make it more difficult to root for the people onscreen.

In this execution of making the audience do the aforementioned, I think this film doesn't do the best job. I appreciate the backstory we get for them, well at least for a few of them, and it does work in making you understand their point of views. However, I'm just not sure if it's enough to overcome what the characters are actually doing; it's not like they are Robin Hoods... well, I guess they actually are robin hoods (ha! Get it! Sorry!) but you get what I mean.

There's also an inconsistency in that they avoid going up a level in their activities as they know it'll bring more heat - yet not long after stating that they brazenly take it up a notch anyway. A possible 'out' is they are blinded by wonga but that's unconvincing. All this is just me saying that the writing isn't the best, in my opinion of course.

What does save this is that the feel of the film is competent, it's fairly well put together and moves along at a decent pace. The cast are also positives, with Stephen Odubola being the clear standout as Ash. Taz Skylar and Mohammed Mansaray are alright, though Craige Middleburg and Mae Muller (strange casting for the latter) are more miss than hit. I would've liked Steve Toussaint to have been used more.

Glad I watched this at the cinema though, always nice to support productions from the homeland. Two groups of two were in there with me, though one duo did decide to leave with a good chunk of the movie left; I see other reviewers have noted likewise - ouch! I can possibly see why if I'm totally truthful, but for me I just about got enough out of it. I could easily be rating this a step lower, though.

"Ash" (Stephen Odubola) lives at home with his young sister and his permanently absent or stoned mother. His dream is to start a business of his own (he likes to fix things) and to get her into rehab. To that end he's mixed up with four of his mates in a snatch 'n grab scheme using mopeds to pinch mobile phones and handbags from unsuspecting folks on the street. They sell these on to "Shaz" (Jelena Gavrilovic) who happens to be the cousin of the gang's leader "Dubz" (Taz Skylar). "Ash" finds the shoebox under his bed is gradually filling up, but when he's told his mother's medical costs are likely to run to £25,000 he realises that nicking a few phones ain't going cut it. After a raid to get themselves some new transport goes awry, with one of their number a bit too handy with the spray-on acid, they are reduced to four and given a new task. Rob a jewellery store and make some proper money. When this goes tragically wrong, "Ash" and his pals "Kabz" (Mohammed Mansaray) and "Mole" (Tobias Jowett) have to persuade their briefly ostracised mate "Roach" (Craige Middleburg) to come back and help them - because their paymasters are still demanding a sackful of loot! Up until this point, the film is actually quite decent - a diverse group of life-long mates all carrying out what they reckon are victimless crimes to make some cash. Once the violent elements kick in, though, the plot really heads south. What made it a bit different is subsumed into a rather amateurishly directed affair with implausible police chases, even more unlikely robbery scenarios and just one chunk too much of bad decision making - on and off the screen. Skylar is a man with charisma, but the rest of these characters never light up the screen or the story and by the sequel-suggesting conclusion, I'd sort of lost interest. It is worth a watch with all the "life's there for the taking" stuff going on, but it'll be on the television soon enough and I'm sure it can wait til then.

Where do you even begin with this codswallop produced by Amazon? Not one interaction between any of the characters, no matter how big or small had an ounce realism. Everything was so unnatural that you might wonder if this group of supposed actors weren't just caught in a giant butterfly net on a London estate and instructed to speak a load of cringeworthy nonsense to one another in front of a camera. No one comes out of this with any credit. If you've seen one chav movie, you've seen them all. Tune in for a laugh but do be warned; viewing this drivel for any longer than 60 seconds could cause brain damage.

Know what I'm sayin' fam?

The film is boring and predictable, the main character is awful and stupid , some of the lesser gang members were more memorable than the lead who blunders from one crisis to another. You never really root for him or feel sorry for him, he neglects his family although the film makers are trying to make him some sort of underdog hero fighting for them. He gets many chances to sort his life out but he never does the right thing and just makes mistake after mistake , a frustrating film with no ending. Was hoping for some sort of twist but it never happens. The film is too slow and nothing really happens until the last 15 mins, it's trying to build up the characters but falls far short. Utterly forgettable and should have gone straight to streaming.

First up, this film was glamorising street crime in the way Top Boy, Adulthood et al did, but way late in the day; I was hoping this was a faded trend because this has been done over and over (the formulaic random kids in a street gang that swear too much and the Russian crime lords all set in the mean / clean streets of London #yawn)

Classics like 'The Harder They Come', where a protagonist makes a living through struggle by turning to crime, but karma gets back at him for his earlier actions are leaps and bounds over these types of dramas; you know why. Because they have an actual ability to portray a human's struggle not just mix together protagonists that could literally exist the whole production in balaclavas, vapid performances made relevant by young people speaking the mumble slang of modern Britain.

I despise how a company the size of Amazon just pushes a trend.

If any of the film crew were swamped by petty criminals on mopeds, they might have reconsidered the lame nature of trying to glamourize real-time criminality to gain social hits in this awful era of media creation.

This production was a childlike CBBC life drama made to help children try and gain an understanding of the modern world, but with the type of language that makes me think a writer asked Chat GPT to make an hour-long migraine of dialogue using as many swear words and brinkmanship of Stormzy's raw lyrics as it could.

Well done all around on style, lovely lighting and whatnot, wardrobe good, cast.. whatever, dialogue.. dry.

Just stop watching this stuff, guys; let the algorithms get to work on some classics again.