Attack the Block

Starring a tough-minded band of scrappy teens who actually do some solving, it's the movie "Super 8" wanted to be - or should have been.

Cornish's idiomatic dialogue is hilarious and the longtime comic's sense of timing is perfect.

There could be a few more scares and laughs, but it's a blast to be drawn into this urban ecosystem that is, to us Yanks, itself a bit alien.

Brit comedian-TV presenter Joe Cornish emerges fully formed as an exciting new writer-helmer with his enormously appealing debut feature, Attack the Block.

What follows is a hilarious, slam-bang series of chases and battles that cross "Gremlins" with "Assault on Precinct 13," the two most prominent of many genre films quoted by Attack the Block.

More "Bloody Kids" than "Super 8," more "Assault on Precinct 13" than "Jumanji," and, in the end, more "Be Kind Rewind" than "Adventures in Babysitting."

Attack the Block is the other alien-invasion movie opening today, the lousy one, the one from Britain. In Britain, it's probably just a regular bad movie, but here - with accents that are barely comprehensible and in-jokes about council flats, not to mention a swerving handheld camera and some of the cheapest effects since "Night of the Lepus" - it's surprising this thing ever got released.

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

The main characters are not particularly sympathetic--you first meet them while they're mugging someone, so the film initially seems to encourage you to hope for their comeuppance via alien invasion. The language was also pretty hard to understand, though subtitles help. It was full of very contemporary pop culture references, and parts of it were quite funny.

"Attack the Block" is exactly what you should expect from an R-rated sci-fi. Gore, loads of f-bombs, and crazy dialogue. The film is very cheesy, but very entertaining. The street thugs turn into kick ass superheros who fend off these aliens from destroying London. Very entertaining, right? I say if you enjoyed Alien, Independence Day, or Straight Outta Compton, you will enjoy Attack The Block. 6/10

The humour is for the most part poor, and acting performances are overall weak. Nick Frost has his funny moments but the characters your supposed to care about are more ambivalent ones to you. Must say though, Alex Esmail was brilliant in this film, he really has some comedic chops. The film provides a look into underprivileged teenagers of the U.K. and how they are review by the outer oublic which is interesting, but the material around the main subject matter is weak and sadly doesn't provide much substance.

Joe Cornish makes a fundamental blunder with the story that cripples the movie before it really gets going. You don't allow your lead character - your hero - to band together with his young masked male friends, to surround a terrified nurse, and then threaten her with a knife until she surrenders her bag, her ring, etc. TARP (the average reasonable person) probably ancipated a ****. Joe must not have a mother, sisters or female friends he cares a whip about. It's a little tough for the lead character to redeem himself in the eyes of the audience after an opening act like that. Even when the same youngster (Moses) forces himself into the young lady's flat to flee the aliens, he never gives the lady a choice but help his buddy. He later semi-apologizes to her, saying he did it because he didn't know she was "from the block." Yes, he would have robbed her of her dignity with a clear head if she was from the next block. It was interesting that I saw this film a couple of nights after the London riots began because the youngsters from this film looked a lot like the rascals looting and burning the stores around that great city. In this context, and thinking about my own sister and mother, I just couldn't find myself so easy to forgive Moses and his pals for their crimes againt the young nurse. Beyond this fundamental problem, the movie is just not all that funny, and the aliens are not all that scary. Sorry, Joe. Try again.