Excellent but underrated film

A different way of telling a story

It's not great by any means, but it's a pretty good movie that didn't leave me filled with regret for investing time in it.

I wanted to like it more than I actually did... But much of the humor totally escaped me and I walked out only mildly impressed.

Phew! Am I ever glad I got out of that environment! Here I am sitting in Vancouver some 55 years after growing up in a council estate. An Estate that started off being a beautiful new village and then descended into a drug filled, violent, holding cell. Just like the ones portrayed in this series.Liverpool's always been a place where you have to know your boundaries, you don't venture into certain areas because of their reputations. If you don't go there then you''ll be OK, but the trouble is that the residents of some of the estates are roving marauders and you can be the innocent victim if you're in their pathway.This series portrays it brilliantly with all of the zeitgeist of Merseyside percolating throughout the story. I have to say that it doesn't seem to have changed that much since I left, middle class people are still wonderfully polite, most of the Estate denizens are warm and natural and the yobboes are just as ugly and nasty as I remember them.That antisocial streak in the underclass has been developed over years and years of unemployment, hand to mouth existence, hopeless futures and a hatred of the privileged classes. With this sort of framework things go wrong , as they did in this case, but the story is told in a way that highlights the huge chasm between the poor on the Estates and the rest of normal society. The absolute disdain for any form of authority is born out of a situation that says "How are you going to punish me any more than the punishment I get from living here already?" "I don't care what you do to me!"You'd be hard pressed to separate the professional actors from the locals who were recruited for the series, it is so very well done by everyone involved. You'll also be hard pressed not to get through this without openly crying at some of the heart wrenching scenes.Truly a great production

The shaky cam was so bad my head was spinning and I had to give up less than 7 minutes in. I'm sure I would have been gripped by the story and drama unfolding, and that it was an accurate telling of a senseless crime, but I didn't get the chance to be able to judge that. Why directors insist on using hand held cameras that induce nausea when watching is beyond me.

There are two sides to every story and this production does not present them. In fact there are three main plot strands-- one involving the victim's family, one involving the lead investigator, and one where the perpetrators and their crowd are lumped together. But all these plots are set up to make the viewer feel sorry for the victim's family. I guess that's understandable given the nature of the main crime but it does not really give us an unvarnished look at society like it should, or why this situation happened in the first place.I would have preferred to see the story a bit from the point of view of the boys that where charged, as well as their families. All the lower class characters in this tale are presented as untrustworthy and unreliable, out to cover things up. There is no sympathetic rendering of the struggles they face; not even the mothers are presented in any kind of sympathetic light. One of the mothers ultimately does the right thing and tells the truth in court, but then a lawyer quickly tries to discredit her statements as false because she's supposedly a known liar.As for the detective assigned to the case, we are told at the end he became friends with the victim's family. So obviously all scenes in which he appears are going to be slanted to make him more heroic and to make his female superior look like a villain.The production itself is too long. Four full hours is way too much to devote to this story. Each of the four one-hour installments I watched had at least 15 minutes that could have been cut. Meaning this could have been told in a much more compact three hours if the narrative had been tightened. In the first installment we get shots of the victim's mother carefully ironing and putting clothes in her son's bedroom drawers. We also see her and her husband discussing what color to paint a living room wall. As well as lingering shots of soccer balls in the backyard. Tedious and a waste of screen time that had nothing to do with the key issues of the story. In the second and third installments there are countless scenes of the police reviewing the video footage of the killing with nothing new being figured out or added to the story. A montage or lap dissolve compressing these non-events would have been sufficient. The third installment has lingering shots of the police on their computers-- at one point the director and editor cut to a shot of a keyboard as a police officer debates typing something. Why? There's no real reason for all the wasted screen time. The filmmakers do not seem to know how to tell the story more expediently. It's like their primary goal is to just fill up screen time.There are also a lot of long tracking shots, meant to convey realism. Some of these work rather well. Especially in the first part where the victim is killed and we have a nearly two-minute shot of Rhys' mother leaving the house and going to the car park. But after a while these long tracking shots are an artistic nuisance. In some cases you can tell the actors have to wait to deliver their dialogue because they're walking ahead of the camera crew waiting for the microphones to catch up to them so their dialogue can be audibly recorded. As a result we get a very stilted and very labored presentation of a story that is entertaining only in how transparent its biases are and how transparently artistic the people behind the camera are trying to put this over on the viewers.

STAR RATING: ***** Saturday Night **** Friday Night *** Friday Morning ** Sunday Night * Monday Morning In August 2007, in the car park of The Fir Tree pub in Croxteth, Liverpool, eleven year old Rhys Jones, who was on his way home from football practice, became the most innocent of casualties in a local gang rivalry, dying after being accidentally shot by a bullet meant for someone else. On the eve of promotion, Detective Superintendent Dave Kelly (Stephen Graham) is assigned to lead the investigation into Rhys's death that comes to have a far more profound effect on his professional and home life than he could have imagined. Despite his dogged determination to get justice for Rhys and his parents Mel (Sinead Keenan) and Steve (Brian F.O' Byrne), Kelly encounters a wall of silence from a local community living in fear of the gangs and the repercussions of being labelled a 'grass.' Ten years on from the case that this TV drama is based on, ITV have chosen to make it into a three part drama detailing the case and how events panned out. There's certainly a lot of meat on the bones to work with, and the film is careful not to sensationalise anything, and tell the case in a sensitive and effecting way. Aside from the already horrifying death of a child, the case grabbed the nations attention also by highlighting what may well be a commonplace truth around the country, of normal, decent, respectable people living alongside those who live by their own rules with no intention of living honestly, and the shocking consequences of what happens when these two worlds sometimes inevitably collide.Although he feels a little too much like the 'go to' guy for this part, it can also be said that there was no better person for the lead role than Graham, with his natural Scouse background and pretty realistic physical resemblance to the real Dave Kelly. He fits the part pretty effortlessly, but still turns in a reliably great performance, as an increasingly seasoned detective who feels personally affronted by the crime he is investigating, unable to let it go due to the sheer outrageousness and senselessness of it, young men whose need to belong and be part of armies who are willing to endanger and take life for something as stupid as an area code. He is complimented by Keenan and O'Byrne as Rhy's grieving parents, O'Byrne bringing a quiet, bottled up angst as the father, with Keenan an emotional torrent as the mother.During the film, Mel takes exception to Rhys being described as being 'in the wrong place at the wrong time.' It's a commonly thrown around soundbite, that is rather unintentionally thoughtless in its use. A very lawful world and a very uncivilised world do coexist by each other very unknowingly, and that world can sometimes reach up and bite with the most tragic of results. But it should always be that world that never has any place or any time, rather than the decent one. ****