A young boy is killed on an estate in London and the police
are having trouble finding enough evidence to arrest the boy responsible.
It would be easy to paint Emle (Charles Mnene) as the killer and if you
were to hear of Kwame’s (Lanre Malaolu) death in the news, you’d most likely see it as black
and white as that. But the film gives an insight into Emile’s actions and the
behaviours of a lot of the people in that area. At one point, Dwayne (Aml Ameen) is going
to kill Emle, not because he necessarily wants to but because Emle called him
a liar and so he has to protect his reputation and not appear ‘soft’. People
just want to get by and having grown up there, they know that the best way to
do that is to not come across as weak. It turns out that Emle’s girlfriend,
Shanice (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), told him that Kwame had tried to chat her up. When Kwame runs into
Emle and his friends, he just tries to get past without causing a problem but
he knows something is going to happen. Emle’s friends push Emle into chasing
him and it eventually leads to Kwame being stabbed. Emle couldn’t just let him
go, he had to make sure everyone knew that he was with Shanice and he wouldn’t
take kindly to anyone trying to get close to her. He is haunted by the stabbing
and it causes problems for him. I think the important thing here is that he
didn’t necessarily want to kill him but that the circumstances couldn’t allow
for anything else to happen.
I thought the film was really interesting. I’m not sure I
liked the character of the cop who was originally from that estate and who came
back to work on the case. It makes sense that he’d be angry being there but he
is so unforgiving towards the kids. He does say that he had to put up with kids
like that when he was growing up so obviously that would’ve been a difficult
time for him but he would also know that they weren’t solely to blame. The acting
was great and I liked the way the story developed.
8/10
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