Shopping

Shopping is set in a shabby, dark, crumbling post-industrial UK city in the early 90s. Blast furnaces and abandoned factories line the roads, battered old Ford Escorts, Sierras, Capris and early 90s BMWs are everywhere. The plot centres around a grim inner city estate of dilapidated tower blocks and deals with the aspirations of some of its residents.

Jude Law plays self-destructive Billy McKenzie, a 19 year old nihilistic man who despises his society and hates his life. His older girlfriend Jo (played by Sadie Frost) is tired of the scene Billy is involved with, car theft, joy riding and ram raiding, but cannot drag him out of it. Sean Pertwee gives a good performance as another petty criminal Tommy, whose interests have grown to include shifting stolen goods, drugs, organised crime and generally more aspirational ideals.

After being released from his first three-month tenure in prison, Billy immediately seeks out his old mates and gets back into his old ways. Tommy initially tries to make an ally of him with stories of organisation and easy money, but Billy is only interested in getting respect from the estate and destruction and adrenaline and soon makes himself an enemy of Tommy and his crew, with ultimately tragic consequences.

Whilst the screenplay and direction are excellent, the film is totally let down by its script. Many of the character's exclamations and reposes are less than natural, some are downright baffling and some leave you cringing in your seat. It's not consistently bad, there are also genuinely heart wrenching moments and some excellent quotes, but you will also find yourself burying your head in your hands at other points and thinking "nobody says that!". Billy's two mostly annoying mates are stereotypes of stereotypes and there's also some representations of dark and dingy illegal "raves" that are... well, preposterous.

But when all's said and done, despite the cheesy moments in the script, it's a good movie. The story, all the action aside, is really about Billy's seething self-hate and unwillingness to love and be loved. The cars, the ram-raiding, the police, Tommy, the estate... it's all just a backdrop to the story of the slow and tragic destruction of an depressed young man caught in a world he has learned only to hate.

Brilliant if slightly flawed - one for the gutter kids of the 90s.

I didn't think I'd like this film after all these years. Boy was I wrong! Billy is actually much more sympathetic than his role suggests, compared to the criminals of today anyway. He's a loser adrenalin junkie, true, but there's something pure, almost artistic about his love of the chase and addiction to capturing and destroying high powered automobiles.

He doesn't attack people and he isn't in it to make money - he just loves shopping! By which I mean ram-raiding high class shopping malls and stealing odd bits of crap. Billy isn't antisocial, he loves his father (who has given up on him) and has a great platonic love for his girl, whom he doesn't shag but prefers to stay best friends with. All in all, a very sympathetic character that just couldn't exist today. Bit silly, but then I think you had to be around in the 90s to really appreciate what this film's about - there was that time when nobody had any money and car thieves had the edge on the cops, and all their crimes only involved cars and shops anyway, and who cares about some stupid machine? It reminds me a lot of "Crash" - the JG Ballard novel and the late-nineties film - in that it has that Ballardian acknowlegement that we all secretly want the bomb to drop, we want the bad guy to win, and that's what's so great about Shopping. Considering that he's a posh kid Jude Law's performance is stellar.

So if you like the 80s and 90s, like the "industrial" asthetic, love to see cars destroyed, hate (or have hated) authority, watch this film. It's the cools.

This movie is an interesting debut from Paul (WS) Anderson. Dark sets and cool visuals teamed with techno music really get you going. You can see the visual style from the director Mortal Kombat and Resident Evil.

Speaking of MK, that Orbital song is used in this movie too.

I think this is the first film were Jude Law actually looks prettier than his female co-star.

Having read all the other reviews on this site, I notice that most people either completely hate the film or completely love it. I take the middle ground. I greatly enjoyed the visual elements, both with regard to the good-looking leads and the stylish camera work. I enjoy a film where I can pick out performers from other films and this one offered a few. I recognized Jason Isaacs (Captain Hook in the recent "Peter Pan" film), for one. That being said I was disappointed that Sean Bean's part was so small. However, I was glad Marianne Faithful's role was only a small cameo. It is painful to me to see her looking so haggard.

I also enjoyed the pulsating soundtrack and believe that, with an inferior effort, the film would be even less appealing.

As others have pointed out, there's not much of a plot, but, beyond that, it was difficult to sympathize with the characters -- other than the police! The law officers in this film were not portrayed as sadistic or even unlikable. Frustrated, yes. The "protagonists" had no redeeming characteristics other than youth, good looks and energy. The film seems to present the viewpoint that the police deserved the treatment they received from the thugs. To me, the film produces a nihilistic, 'who gives a damn' about anything attitude. It made me think about anarchy: after "the system" is demolished, with what will it be replaced?

I'm probably waxing too philosophical about a movie that never even aspired to such musings. The producers probably just wanted to give a youthful audience the smash 'em up, 'wham bam thank you ma'am' form of entertainment many seem to want. (Witness "The Fast and the Furious" and Vin Diesel's "XXX" among others.) I like a bit of action, too, but I prefer to care about someone or something along the line.

Nevertheless, I maintain that I have seen worse films. I confess to an admiration of British films and actors that causes me to overlook aspects of a movie that I don't like in order to focus on what I consider to be redeeming features. For example, I found Sean Pertwee's character in this film interesting, even if the character is what we Americans like to call a "scumbag". The bottom line, to me, is that the positives -- including the soundtrack, visual elements, and interesting cast -- outweigh the negatives. I bought the film at what you British call a jumble sale for $2.00 (American money), so I'm not out a lot of loot in any case. I will keep the film alongside "Love, Honour and Obey", another second-hand bargain I found along the way. It too, has redeeming features.

1994's "Shopping" (stylized as "$hopping") is a movie that I first came across during the late-night cable hours as an impressionable 10- or 11-year-old growing up in the mid-1990s. Of course, due to the fact that I was such an impressionable young child growing up at that time, my parents were keen to keep me away from "Shopping," a film with a futuristic, industrial-heavy aesthetic that appeared to glamorize auto theft, ram-raiding and unsavory, Adrenalin-addicted thrill-seeking young car thieves. (And not so surprisingly, this helped the film to generate a controversy in the United Kingdom for supposedly glamorizing criminal, anti-social behavior.)

"Shopping" is mostly remembered for being a noteworthy early film credit for its two leads, as well as being the directorial debut of a then-29-year-old Brit named Paul Anderson (who now goes by "Paul W. S. Anderson" to avoid confusion with American filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson). Paul Anderson would later gain worldwide recognition just one year later for his American film debut, "Mortal Kombat" (1995), which is a film I love to death and to this day I still consider it to be the greatest film adaptation of a video game.

"Shopping" is a stylish, yet promising debut for Anderson, whose career has since been a wildly mixed bag of occasional high points (the aforementioned "Mortal Kombat," "Event Horizon," "Resident Evil") and several missteps ("Soldier," "AVP: Alien vs. Predator" and virtually every "Resident Evil" sequel he's directed, pretty much).

"Shopping," nonetheless, showcases what would later become Anderson trademarks: excellent set design and cinematography, fast-paced direction, and a wall-to-wall soundtrack with an industrial/techno vibe to it (Orbital's "Halycon + On + On," which is featured prominently in the film several times, appears to be a personal favorite of Anderson's, since the song was also played near the end of his later "Mortal Kombat"). "Shopping" is set sometime in the not-too-distant future in London, and centers around the so-called "sport" of "shopping" - stealing high-priced cars and then ramming them through department store windows, looting them, and then evading the police.

Billy (Jude Law) is probably the most notorious of these young, early 20-something ram-raiding punks. He, along with his casual would-be love interest, the video game-loving Jo (Sadie Frost, Law's future real-life wife), hit the streets (and stores) after he gets released from prison at the beginning of the film after doing three months for auto theft. Although it doesn't take long for Billy to fall back into old habits once released, his "shopping sprees" are becoming more and more ambitious, and reckless, as his targets become bigger and bigger. As the stakes rise and his notoriety grows, it catches the attention of his old rival Tommy (Sean Pertwee, an Anderson regular), for whom the sport of "shopping" is a business, since Tommy makes money selling off the goods he steals. For Billy, it's nothing more than an Adrenalin rush that he claims is better than any drug and is to a degree (for him, at least), an art-form. So it inevitably sets the two of them down a path toward a head-on collision.

"Shopping" is a stylish and ambitious debut feature from Paul Anderson that established many of his trademarks - most notably his love for industrial music, and this film revels in its striking industrial-futuristic ambiance - but also shows his weaknesses, namely weak characterization, spotty writing and story. His non-written directorial works ("Mortal Kombat," "Event Horizon," and even the hokey "Soldier") were better showcases for Anderon's strengths as a director because he didn't have screen-writing credits attached to these pictures, but instead worked because of his stylish, fast-paced direction. Here, Jude Law and Sadie Frost give stellar and enthusiastic performances in roles for which they were young and relatively unknown to American audiences (at the time), and have since become more widely known.

Watching "Shopping" for the first time since I was a child, it's an impressive debut from Paul W. S. Anderson, in spite of his flaws (of which there are many), and is something that can happen with any early effort from any director.

6/10.