The greatest movie ever made..!

Thanks for the memories!

An action-packed slog

Blistering performances.

An utterly captivating drama, perfectly executed over four episodes with not a single flaw to be found.Top-notch writing, precision directing, exemplary performances from the entire cast, seamless editing, with music and cinematography that intelligently don't make themselves noticed (so nothing showy or artsy, just excellent scene-setting) perfectly paced with an overall sense of all-round good storytelling.Every moment of this true-life drama was suffused with authenticity, integrity, and verisimilitude, with no audience manipulation to be detected (which doesn't mean it wasn't there; just that it was artfully and subtly done). This is a rare gem that is worth watching more than once, although the subject matter is grim. Top marks.

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.

I remember when Rhys was shot, the incident this drama is about, and it was an awful event and anybody who was aware of the case at the time will have no surprises with this drama. There was plenty of controversy over the whole event from poor Rhys' death, his family's strength, the age of the killers and the frustrating and seemingly all encompassing hurdle of getting witnesses to "grass".All of the above is covered sensitively and, with the Jones' giving their input to this drama, a fair degree of accuracy too. You obviously feel for the victim and his family but this drama also shines a light on peer pressure, the difficulty of getting someone to agree to be a witness due to the stigma and dangers of being a " grass" and the shameful enabling and apathetic attitude of some of the suspects' parents.Whether someone is aware of the case or not this is an interesting, gripping and emotive drama. You can't watch this and leave it not feeling anything. Utterly heartbreaking. RIP Rhys Jones.

Pretty much every British person watching this already knows what's going to happen... but you'll still be hootin' and a hollerin' as events unfold and the journey to justice is completed. The writing, acting and everything else about this 4-part TV docu-drama is spot on. If you're not familiar with the story you're going to enjoy this even more.In 2007 an 11-year-old Rhys Jones was walking home from footy practice. As he cut through a pub car-park to get home the boy was fatally shot by a teenage gang member. About eight months later the police finally get their man and this is the story of how it happened.The writer (Oscar nominee Jeff Pope) has chosen to follow the facts of the case and not allow the emotions of the story to get the better of him. If you're binge- watching this it's three hours long and not a minute is wasted.As we're watching the story unfold through all the characters on both sides of the law, it's easy to forget that we're looking at something that is very close to what actually happened.These kinds of 'stories' are the staple of 'conveyer-belt' fictional police procedurals, almost all of which fall well short of this mesmerizing drama. It's as good as 2016's "In Plain Sight" which was another, similar TV 'docu-drama' about the detection and pursuit of a killer.This is top notch television and I hope the victim's family approves of the way their story has been handled. They had a hand in helping to re-tell their side of this horrible and senseless tragedy so I strongly suspect that they do.Here's some trivia... Apart from the actual shooting, the drama was filmed in and around Liverpool. The funeral was filmed in the Anglican Cathedral and the minute's applause was filmed during half-time of a match played at Goodison Park. The case itself was filmed at Liverpool Crown Court inside the courtroom where the original trial took place. Pretty spooky, eh?Excellent and captivating television - proving that British TV CAN do it when they want to!