This Is England

Viewer Rating:Pandabat has rated This Is England rating: 1.5 Star

Set in England in the early 1980s, in a time when Thatcher had embroiled the nation in the rather pointless Falklands war, racial tensions are present and when unemployment is growing, "This Is England" is the story of a boy, whose own father has been killed in the Falklands, growing up amongst the disaffected and disillusioned youth that were spawned by those times. After suffering bullying at school, he finds status and acceptance with a local gang of skinheads and boot-boys who are initially harmless enough. However, a former member, Combo, returns from prison with a fundamentalist nationalist view and his rhetoric from the British Nationalist Party begins to split the group up to those loyal to his ideas and those who prefer to go there own way. Violent tragedy is inevitable but is the building up of this that is one of the stronger points of this movie. Thomas Turgoose and Stephen Graham are particulary good in their roles as Shaun, the bullied schoolboy turned mini-skinhead, and Combo, the psychotic jailbird, respectively but no one in the cast lets the side down with well-measured performances turned in all around. While there's no great look to the movie, characters and situations are excellently observed, with some great humour coming from Shaun's behaviour and language being inappropriate to his age. It is only really let down by it's plot which doesn't really go anywhere and gets both flustered and lost towards the end but this is a performance and character movie more than anything else so there are worse ways to spend an hour and a half.

Review published on the 04 May 2007 17:55