Triads, Yardies & Onion Bhajees!

STAR RATING: ***** Saturday Night **** Friday Night *** Friday Morning ** Sunday Night * Monday Morning

Set in the multi-cultural London criminal underworld, Mad Dave (Dave Courtney) arranges a meeting with some members of the Asian 'Holy Smokes' gang, to mastermind a robbery at Heathrow Airport, behind the back of their leader Chacha (Jass Bassi.) Everything, apart from a security guard being killed, goes to plan...but the two more reckless members of the group are also caught up in a plan to distribute cocaine in onion bahjees, that has resulted in the death of the brother of Billy Chan (Peter Peralta), the leader of the Triads, who, of course, wants revenge, leaving Jaz (Ashwin Kumar Joshi), the level headed member of the group, in a difficult situation. Chacha's right hand man, Singh (Manish Patel, also directing), comes looking for answers, when Jaz's lover, the sister of the leader of the Yardies, gets caught up in it all.

This, somewhat low budget, film, has the look of a student production all over it (though what was to be gained from filming it in grainy black and white remains unknown!) I've only just found out how long it's been held back for, which should give some indication of how people wanted it brushed under the carpet. It's an ambitious looking project, aiming for a mix of hard hitting slice of gangster life and more light hearted stuff. Sadly, all the constraints stop it reaching it's full potential, a shame since director/star Patel could go on to greater things if he got the right people behind him. **

The grainy black and white I totally get. The lack of engaging plot is not the worst I've ever known.

But what kills this film from within the first couple of minutes is the atrocious acting. I'd go so far as to say they were just reading an autocue! I've seen better acting from Joey in Friends and in my high school drama class.

I am a fan of cheesy, bad movies but this is so poorly acted, it makes the whole film completely unwatchable.

Only once before in over 30 years have I not watched a film to the very end, including every bad TV movie you can think of... But this is now the second.

Save your money - Go watch a 1970s adult film where the mustachioed plumber comes to fix the fridge. It's more convincing!!

I had very high hopes for this film. It had won the best black and Asian film category at Cannes so i thought there must be something in it that warranted such high acclaim. I downloaded the trailer and viewing it made me even more excited about watching this film. The trailer was fantastic and made the film look like it was the best film ever made. I finally got the chance to view it at the Metro Cinema in Derby. I took my wife along with me. One of my best friends from school was one of the actors in the film, he played a character called Rocky. I had excitedly told my wife how good this film was going to be so you can imagine my disappointment when i finally did get to see it. I just didn't get it. The picture was grainy but i put that down to it being an artistic film. The acting was poor but i put that down to inexperience. The story was sketchy and by then i had ran out of excuses. It was so poor that i walked out before the film had ended. I never do that normally but i really was not bothered how this film ended as it would have made no difference to my overall opinion of it. If only the film was as good as the trailer, it would have been a classic. Sorry my friend, i'm just being honest.

I find it difficult to objectively write a full review of this title "Triads, Yardies, Onion Bhagees" as I only could manage 30 minutes. The concept of a multi-culturally controlled London criminal underworld and their struggles for dominance and diplomacy is a good one. Yet, it has been used before. Anyone thinking the Grand Theft Auto games if you replace London with "generic American city"?

As a fan of innovative screenplay, hand-held cameras and gritty settings I should be sympathetic towards this film. It reminded me of a poor attempt between the Shield and Jean Luc Goddard's Breathless. Having now related those two brilliant titles to this makes me feel dirty... If you watch the film, you'll see what I mean with the whole film being done through hand-held camera with not one single establishing shot. This I can survive with for half an hour - but please... there has to be sometime to rest! The camera often tried to show off with some freezes and zooming in. Some showy angles and trying basically to be exciting. Often it seemed to much a student project but once in a while there was a good shot. Problem was with this, when one was found, the trick was abused and used over and over again. In some ways, it was like watching an advert with fast changes from angles and moments within a scene, dialogue being narrated much like one long incessant movie commercial for a film rather than a film itself. This concept never seemed to stop and became more confusing than flashy. These jump cuts being used like French New Wave on crack!

The soundtrack had some good samples. However, the problem lies there. They should have remained samples. Through the first 30 minutes, ten second samples were looped over and over in certain scenes. Changing to another sample for the next scene. In fact, the soundtrack NEVER stops. One scene is a bhangra sample on loop, next it's some gangsta rap. It's also louder than the speech. My thoughts for this were to fill the lack of dialogue and to cover it's poor content for when someone did say something.

The acting was waaaaay over the top. Not one actor held my attention, sympathy or drew any kind of interest. Many of the actors seemed to have little experience of acting to the point of being dragged off the street. The worst moment had to be the introduction to the Chinese boss. This was the only point where a soundtrack stopped... only replaced with an ambient tone... in an attempt to appear mystic and frightening, his accent was Oxbridge, but his overacting and whispering with little gestures were pretty cringe worthy. His bodyguards were the most disappointing - especially their dresscode which was probably attempting to be Matrix-esquire.

The realism is pretty poor without a doubt. Whether this was intentional, I am uncertain. Research into the subject is laughable. One thing that particularly bugged me was a character in almost every scene would have to have a gun as a prop at one point. Whether to caress, pull out and put on the table and shove in someone's face. Now, I'm not a gangster but surely some subtly is required. Maybe it's just to remind the audience we're looking at gangsters. Having said that, I did notice a blatant yet respectable homage to Scarface where a line of coke is done off the DVD box...

CGI and effects are non-existent. Clearly, this is a low budget film. So I wouldn't expect there to be. But one attempt at a gunshot when the bullet missed and hit the wall was embarrassing! The was a little fireball on the wall when the bullet hit which looked like a cartoon explosion from an old arcade game. On top of that, it was in colour. The rest of the film is in black and white.

Regarding the grainy black and white setting. A lot of people have been quite critical of this. Personally, like the concept of the film and some of it's ideas; it isn't bad. They're just done too many times, too blatantly and abused. Of course, this isn't the case with the black and white, since they've stuck to it. As a fan of New Wave, I would say black and white with a touch of grain deserves a nod every now and then; it's a great effect for a film. But unfortunately not to everyone's taste.

This film I'd say 2 stars. Maybe some people out there like watching it - personally I'd say it's good if you're 14, an aspiring "gangsta" and playing Grand Theft Auto when you should be at school, but for anyone else, give it a miss.

Wow how bad? very bad. The whole thing looks like it was shot on a 1990's hand held camcorder from Argos. I can only image they had colour temperature issues (tungsten/daylight) so switch to b&w problem solved. It adds nothing to the film. The Acting is well awful very forced which combined with the bad editing that exaggerates the bad acting. Again the editing some scenes seem like the whole disappearing rabbit trick, actors suddenly appearing. I read the bad reviews but have waited years to see it. The fact it was "banned" gives it some creditability until you realise it was probably banned for being crap. The violence is laughable if anyone seriously thinks this is what is secretly happening behind the closed doors of London then you must be very stupid. Yardies scene WTF. Its just terrible. Still got another 30 minutes to go, time to go in the bin. Save yourself and your time. To many great British gangster movies just this is not one of them.