Ill Manors

Dirty, intense, atmospheric but in the end also unnecessarily shattered by a new relationship plot line and overall half an hour longer than it should be. In any case, hands down a successful directorial début that will make you feel happy that you don’t live in the jungle that is the British underworld. As usual, I had trouble relating and rooting for anyone, but that’s something that happens to me regularly in this kind of movies. A good knowledge of English will also help, there’s a lot of rap that moves the plot forward that can never be replaced by subtitles or translations. Even though I’m certainly not a fan of rap, in this film the musical parody was really good :) (14.12.2012)

I'll warn you up front that I just supremely like Ill Manors – the film has balls, it's not afraid to experiment technically, the actors are decent, more than one situation is perfectly escalated (the execution by the river is a frontrunner for me), and the gritty in da hood atmosphere is quite authentic. Plus, the whole shebang cost GBP 100,000. To give you an idea, that's half of what a single dialogue scene in Sherlock Holmes costs. The cons of Ill Manors can practically all be put down to the fact that Ben Drew wrote and wrought the whole thing himself. And it's actually kind of fun to pick out the little flaws. The script, for example, creates a good half of the events through horrible coincidences, which is really the stuff of a first/second semester creative writing course. Equally ill-fitting is the director's attempt to somehow cinematically wrap up the whole mosaic at the end, which no one really wants him to do, and the fact that the main character has a stronger moral code than I do doesn't help the believability either. But still... (18.01.2013)