London's Finest

Great film! Dark in the right places, comical at the right time. Characters well planned. Perfect amount of plot surprise. A lot of the film reminded me of Snatch.

This is a strange hybrid of a film; on one hand it is quite a brutal London gang, drug and crime tale - with shooters. On the other it is actually quite a well realised dark comedy. I decided to suspend belief for ninety minutes and see what happened.

It is all about Sirus who is a mini cab controller, a seemingly nice guy and a drug dealer. He sells some of his gear to Welsh Yardies who drive up from the valleys for their stuff . There is also a particularly nasty cop - Priestly who is more rotten than a South American Junta, but also has a way with words that is both profane and actually very amusing. I would not want a parking ticket from him. He is on to Sirus and does not use the rule book in any way that a normal cop would recognise.

There is also 'casual racism' which may cause offence even where done for laughs, there is some graphic depictions of violence and there is a lot of shooting. Despite the plot errors and some less than savoury scenes I still found myself laughing and getting completely involved with all the characters. There is also a gang of stereotyped Russian meat heads who were all brilliant - even down to personalised phone rings. All in all this was ninety minutes that just flew by, and as such I wish I had seen this sooner.

Normally I wouldn't stoop to reviewing or even watching one of the endless glut of embarrassingly poor mockney gangster romps that have tainted the British film industry ever since Guy Ritchie decided to give birth to said genre, but in this case, given the believable authenticity and blindingly scripted nature of said venture; I'll make an exception. Smack is the drug of choice in this tale, and likable user Cyrus plays the doped up protagonist finding himself on the receiving end of a particularly vicious and shamelessly corrupt detective looking to manipulate him into delivering a mammoth stash of brown. Fortunately Cyrus has sterling backup in the form of a pair of welsh gangsters who provide a wealth of snappy dialogue and brutish ballistics. Adding to the comedic energy are an equally deranged mob of Russians who the detective calls in to balance the odds. Every other character has their own podium of eccentricity on which to shine, and grimily they do. Naturally, there is foul language aplenty, but deployed in all the right places for a change, and the frequent incidents of gunplay are air- punchingly superb.

It looked promising at the outset but 20 minutes in and it was plainly obvious all the hackneyed stereotypes were here in full bloom - tired plot, cardboard characters, generic dialogue. There was a little potential shining at the first, but it quickly dissipated. We entertained ourselves by predicting the dialogue and the plot moves with pretty good accuracy! The characters were so shallow and undersketched, we didn't care about any of them - instantly forgettable - despite their desperate moves to be cool and hip. Those old tired cliches ran overtime here - you know - where the cool rock music blares loudly on and the action goes into slow-mo anytime the "good guys" are on. Not sure how we got to the end of the film - but toward the end a buddy asked, - "what happened to the knitcap wearing guy?" - and we all laughed when I answered, "does it really f*** matter?" As someone else here also noted - ignore the obvious film staff reviews here - all plants. You just can't trust any reviews here in IMDB anymore.

Overall this film is just like it's AKA title "Hackney's Finest" - it's the true definition of hackneyed - "lacking significance through having been overused; unoriginal and trite."

In a nutshell - empty, predictable and boring.

It is really great to see a British independent movie, we get so few British films these days and this one has some gloss. Although I heard this was quite a low budget film, at no time does it give the impression there was a budget. The film is slick and glossy, some really great stunts and was very polished. I loved the way the characters were introduced at the beginning of the film, really nice directing. This is not your run of the mill action movie. Parts of this film are shocking reminding me of how I felt when I first watched Train Spotting. There are some really graphic images but presented in a comedic way. It shouldn't have worked but it did, I found myself laughing and then felt guilty. The cast has been well selected for the characters they play. Great characterisation! I personally loved the Russian gangsters. Evil as they are I couldn't help laughing and even liking the leader of the Russian gang. The Welsh "Yardies" are very entertaining and added humour to the film but equally they looked the part. The story line has a good pace and some cracking one liners. Some great location shooting giving this film a really gritty and realistic edge. Might need to provide ear muffs for the over 50's (language a bit ripe for me but to be fair the language was used in a humorous way so , after the initial shock I accepted it and felt it added to the atmosphere. Would make a great film to watch in a group over pizza and some beers! Would be good to see a sequel to this.