Hackneys Finest

Sirius (Wiseman) is the usual kind of mockney wide boy that you love to loath. A kid that is actually richer than sin but makes out he is not. He still wants to live the life of drugs and vodka slugs but without the problems that go with that. When he is involved in a drug shipment going astray all seems to become one nightmare after another. He has to contend with problem guns, a beautiful afghan killer, a rather odd ball bent copper, Welsh Jamaican Yardies and some very unhappy Afghan drug smugglers.

This review is actually very hard for me to do. I love both genre cinema and British film. When I was younger there was a major resurgence of British crime films with gangster films at the top of this chain. These parted after a while into send ups of the genre and straight over blown versions of former great films. Today we find that the same has happened again, only on a small screen budget scale. Films with Danny Dyer and films like 'We Still Kill the Old Way' have set about revamping the Brit gangster movie. These have hit DVD and BLU RAY and been sent up the charts at ASDA.

So this brings us to Hackneys Finest. Being a direct send up of the genre and even more so British multiculturalism, this film is right in the middle of the new movement. The problem with the film and in many senses the movement is captured in two things. The first thing is with British comedy it doesn't really translate internationally well and even less so across the UK. So what a London crime film means in say Manchester is utterly different to say what it means in Lewisham. I saw this film as a comical take on modern crime, with a slapstick central performance by Wiseman and a stand out role by Arin Alldridge. We have a beautiful woman Neerja Naik and a great double team in Marlon G. Day and Enoch Frost. The problem is the jokes don't play to the crowd and those that do are often quite weak. This is not the film makers or actors fault, more the film has no flex to make it better.

The second thing is that its grasp on criminality is like that of the Sun newspaper. Young, East Europeans men, Police and ethnic minorities all come out very badly from this film. These type of stereotypes both racial and socioeconomic related are awful and not creative. They play on the fears of its suggested audience and also play in to lazy ideas of how crime is. This lends much to my conclusion that the film is lazy in its written quarter but everywhere else zings. It is misogynistic, homophobic and occasionally deeply horrid in tone but this is a send up. In the end people who have lampooned it should see that the film can be watched with the brain switched firmly in neutral and enjoyed.