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'.

Back in 1980, Franco Rosso's Babylon, starring Aswad's Brinsley Forde, told the story of young black Britain under siege. Filmed around Deptford, Lewisham and Brixton in south London and financed by the National Film Council, it drew a fundamentally honest, unsentimental portrait, employing a rich, unsubtitled patois. Understandably, much of the film also dealt with racism - white on black - and its tragic repercussions.

Twenty-five years on, the most significant (and depressing) thing about Saul Dibb's study of black Londoners is its frank recognition that the hate and violence has since turned inward - manifested in gun crime.

In Bullet Boy, 20-year-old Ricky (Walters, aka So Solid Crew's Asher D) is paroled from youth custody and attempts to rekindle a relationship with his girlfriend Shea (Samuels). Hooking up with his hot-headed friend - the ironically named Wisdom (Black) - he almost immediately runs into trouble with rival Godfrey (Lawson) in a road rage incident. As the tit-for-tat feud escalates, Ricky's impressionable 12-year-old brother Curtis (Fraser) discovers a gun which Wisdom has given Ricky for his protection - and the murderous cycle of violence continues.

This is a film of firsts. Arriving some 15 years after a brace of similarly-themed American films, such as John Singleton's Boyz N The Hood, this is the first film to spotlight gun violence in Britain's black community, and makes an interesting comparison. It's documentary maker Dibb's first feature too, having previously made 'Electric Avenue' and 'The Tottenham Ayatollah' for Channel 4 television. And it's Asher's (okay, Walters') movie debut.

It's a cute - and astute - stroke of casting: he'd read the script while in prison for gun possession. And the cast is one of the things Bullet Boy has got right, featuring gutsy and unsentimental performances, particularly from the all too convincing lead, but also from stand-up comedian Curtis Walker as a former bad-boy-turned-pastor and Perkins as a pragmatic matriarch.

The use of non-professional actors also imbues proceedings with documentary-style naturalism, matched by the film's east London locations, photographed by Marcel Zyskind in pitiless natural light, and employed very effectively during a recurring motif of a dead dog floating on a river like the ghost at the feast.

Though Dibb cannot hope to encompass the whole subject matter in a 90-minute film, his focus on how gun culture affects the entire family unit is an intelligent approach, making the wider issue accessible - and subsequently harder hitting.

If certain sequences appear heavy-handed - 12-year-old Curtis playing shoot-em-up videogames as a prescient prelude to tragedy; the Godfather-style juxtaposition between a church sermon and a murder - well, perhaps that's the way it ought to be.

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.

I saw this film last night at the Tricycle theatre and I have to say it showed the real look at 'road' life as we know it for our young black brothers. Being Black British myself I really felt the film through the eyes of the mother, Ricky and Curtis, it was a brilliant watch. You may call it typical of movies, but this was a British film with edge and class at getting the message right! I was brought to tears on the way home remembering how many of our brothers are going through and have been through (RIP) this similar scenario, so I know why I appreciate being a mentor to uplift my community

Having served his time for stabbing another teenager, Ricky is released from prison and collected by his little brother and his friend Wisdom. Arriving back in London, Wisdom accidentally damages a car of another young man, but Ricky makes him walk away when things escalate towards a fight. However, when Wisdom realises that the word on the street is that he is a p*ssy, he revisits the young man and shoots his dog dead. Ricky tries to resolve the situation to avoid getting drawn back into the violence that landed him in jail in the first place. Meanwhile, younger brother Curtis watches all these things with admiring eyes.

Basically if you can't work out where the film is headed just from my very basic plot summary then you simply haven't seen enough American ghetto movies and indeed, one of the weaknesses in this film is that it is predictable from not only the moment it starts, but even the moment you are in the lobby looking at the poster. The message is simple but an important one and it is one of the reasons you should try and see it. That it is predictable is surprisingly not a problem and somehow the film is still engaging throughout – and I'm not entirely sure why it manages to do it. I think what carries the film is how very natural and down to earth the whole thing is; it feels like real life, the characters feel like real people and for this reason it is engaging because we, the audience, care even if deep inside we know where it is going.

The writing and direction is a big part of making this work. The writing takes the "no way out of the ghetto" cliché and puts it across in such a way that it is not glamorised; the violence starts over nothing and is never anything more than petty and a total waste of time. The small scale of everything within the story is also engaging – the violence is not between "gangstas" "rolling" in "Escalades" or "Lexus" but rather teenagers who live in tiny flats with basic furniture and minor drug habits. Although the sentiment may match those of characters in "hood" movies, the real sense of the small is effective and convincing. The direction helps this, with no flashy camera-work and the feeling of London streets and cramped flats. To me this realism was important mainly because, in the UK, we are constantly assailed by a presentation of reality in R'n'B music of bling, expensive cars and women in shorts; meanwhile UK cinema we have an obsession on cool guns and gangsters that comes from "Lock, Stock" and countless copies. If anything the overwhelming of the market with such images and hype make it all the more important to have a film like Bullet Boy do good business to counter it.

Ironically, lead actor Walters is one of those that has had a part in presenting a life that is outside of the reach of nearly all of us (fast cars, guns, violence, drugs and girls) by his part in videos and songs with So Solid Crew. Indeed the group themselves have had their fair share of headlines over shootings and cars and I would like to think that in some way this film was a decision Walters made to try and redress the balance. Regardless of his motives though, Walters is strong; he is natural and convincing as a black teenager in a high rise world of posturing and trivia and he does it without glamorising it or showing a concern for keeping up his So Solid personae or image. He is given good support from Perkins, Fraser and Black among others – all of whom add to the feeling of a convincing portrayal of daily reality for many. They don't feel the need to play up to black stereotypes of anger and hardships and they are simply convincingly real people.

Overall this is a predictable film that treads a very familiar path but the natural delivery in all aspects mean it come across as convincing and engaging – simply put, we care and we stay with it for that reason. If nothing else, see it to try and counteract the perversion of reality and glamorisation of violence that is pushed in the name of selling records.