Bullet Boy

I would like to start off saying that I appreciated the movie for dealing with the black community in London. No rude cockney gangsters, catchy crime scams or laughably stupid dope dealers. The family this movie deals with is a single mum home with two sons, one just out of prison, the other still too young to be involved in anything hazardous, but looking up at his brother and already copying some of his ways.

I enjoyed the language and the characters who were all convincing and complex enough but, how carefully put down they were, the more obvious and stereotypical were the things happening to them. Everything going from bad to worse, who plays with fire is gonna get burnt. And then the ultimate contrast of either sinking into crime and sin (devil), or choosing the righteous path and go to church every Sunday (god).

This easy moralism hurt the rest of the film. It made things predictable. It was like a newspaper article collage, one shock after the other. It took away much of the complexity that I found in the characters themselves. It really is a shame because the development of the characters could have been much more subtle and would have fit in better with the style of the movie that deals with a gritty context matter but managed to use a soft and sometimes almost dreamy camera and score, not unlike other recent British films, such a 'Morvern Callar' and '16 Years of alcohol'.

This film was painful to sit through. Went to the screening at the London film festival and couldn't believe the stereo typical representations with dialogue so bad (it made me cringe) I couldn't understand how the film council can spend tax payers money on something so pointless.

I went with two black friends of mine to see the film. For a film that's supposed to be of serious nature they laughed all the way through it as if it was a comedy. I assumed I wasn't getting the jokes but later found out they were laughing at it rather than with it.

It was obvious that the executives at film council have none or very little knowledge about the black community in London. I've worked with many black children/ youth and I couldn't recognise many of the characters that appeared on the film.

I wasn't surprised to find out that the producers of this very awful film are actually executives at the film council. NO WONDER. This isn't a film I recommend even when it's on TV.

'Bullet Boy' is an understated drama about an ex-convict trying to go straight in London's black community. The piece is nicely assembled and acted, and makes good visual use of its Hackney setting, but there's nothing in the story which is ultimately surprising. I also have one quibble: the film features a fair amount of gun usage, but we don't see any underlying criminal activity, which is (I think) usually the root cause of shootings. On the other hand, one strength is that the world of the characters is not depicted as a squalid ghetto, but rather as a place in which one can imagine real people living in. Overall, this is not a bad film; but it is a little bland.

This was a great film. I have been watching a lot of urban type UK films lately and this one is by far my favorite so far. The Uk ghettos are very similar to Canada where I live. When people think of Canada and the UK they don't seem to think there are any ghettos. Where I live in Toronto, Ontario, we are influenced by the States a bit but much more by the sizable Jamaican presence in the area. The film did a good job at depicting how such small issues can grow into something very big and life changing. Ashley Waters is very talented. His performance was very believable.

So far I've seen "Rolling with the Nines"(Sucked), "Kidulthood"(Very good), "Life & Lyrics"(Not too bad, but kinda corny). Does anyone know of any other good movies of this same type to suggest? Peace

I wasn't expecting too much of this film before I saw it, but I have to say I was wrong to think it would be dull. Although American audiences -- and, in fact, non-London-dwelling audiences -- probably won't appreciate it for its wonderful depiction of east London, I find myself for once thankful that I live in Hackney. Some scenes around the Hackney Marshes and Lea Valley are astonishingly lush, to the extent that I had my doubts they were actually filmed there, because they present such a contrast to the grubby streets I'm used to, and which are portrayed in other parts of the film.

One of the other things that struck me was the accuracy of the dialogue -- I know this sounds a bit silly, but it's easy to get wrong, and in Bullet Boy there wasn't a word out of place. Lines like "that dog's like my brethren" are faintly amusing, but people do actually speak like that, and Bullet Boy got it exactly right.

I think Bullet Boy is a beautiful film, and have in fact only one gripe besides perhaps its inaccessibility for people who aren't English: the editing-over of a sign at a train station from the station name to 'Platform 2'. I'm an appalling pedant.