Review: Attack the Block

Before John Boyega became forever identified with the rebellious Stormtrooper Finn from Star Wars: The Force Awakens, he played Moses. Not the biblical one, but a 15-year-old kid in South London who leads a gang of teenagers in the middle of an alien invasion.

There’s little question of the film’s moral purpose. It begins by showing us Moses and his gang robbing a middle-class woman at knife point – and then proceeds to humanize them as the plot of the film unfolds, while painting their environment as largely devoid of any compassion or interest.

The aliens, here, are just an exaggerated stand-in for an arbitrary crisis that’s playing out in these kids’ lives, a plot device to make the point that no matter how extreme the circumstances of our protagonists, society will regard them as outcasts. This kind of allegory is difficult to pull off, and Attack the Block doesn’t quite manage it.

Boyega does shine in his role, portraying Moses first as sullen and mean, then as driven and quietly heroic. Unfortunately, the other characters are forgettable. The female lead goes through the conventional “Skeptic No Longer” trope, Moses’ gang members are defined by a strict adherence to a limited subset of London slang, the clueless pothead next door is … clueless. Nick Frost (Hot Fuzz, Shaun of the Dead) plays a small part as a weed dealer, but he’s wasted on a character without charm or wit.

The aliens are boring and mindless, and the premise that nobody much cares about massive meteorites smashing into parts of London is unbelievable. While there is some good fight and chase choreography, the film is strongest in its quietest moments, when characters of different backgrounds come together and start seeing each other as humans, or when we learn about who Moses actually is.

These are moments during which the film redeems itself, though not enough to recommend it, unless you just want to see how John Boyega managed to charm J.J. Abrams’ socks off. There are, it turns out, better vehicles to promote human understanding than corny alien invasion plots.