Undescribable Perfection

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

Great movie. Not sure what people expected but I found it highly entertaining.

True to its essence, the characters remain on the same line and manage to entertain the viewer, each highlighting their own distinctive qualities or touches.

Actor Dexter Fletcher turns to directing and armed with a small budget he seems he has turned to some friends such as Sean Pertwee, Andy Serkis and Olivia Williams to make cameos who appear for a scene or two in the film.The main performances are from Charlie Creed-Miles who is Wild Bill, and his two sons played by Will Poulter and Sammy Williams. Creed-Miles plays a man released from a eight years stretch under licence and finds out that his two young children living alone for the last nine months as their mother has hopped it to Spain.In order for them not to be taken into care he has to be a father to them and gain there respect as he had had no presence in their lives due to his stint in jail.Poulter who is better known though the Narnia films and We're the Millers gives the best performance as a 15 year old who has to work in a building site and fend for his younger sibling. He is matched by Creed- Miles who has to take responsibility maybe for the first time in his life whilst try to keep in the straight and narrow by avoiding the low life who want him to go back to drug dealing and deal with the trouble his youngest son has got himself into.The film is set in Stratford in the shadow of the London Olympic Stadium, its setting is a year before the 2012 Olympics. It does have a very cliché looking urban tower block London setting. It kinds of reminds you of all those Death Wish type films of the 1970s set in New York where you have muggers, drug dealers and rapists in every corner, far outnumbering just ordinary people getting on with their lives. What is worse you have some white people speaking black patois which is very irritating.It is low budget movie making, the film has heart, a very good staged fight scene set in a pub and apart from a paper plane flying scene very little cinematic flair, it could be something British directors such as Alan Clarke could had knocked out rather easily 30 years ago for Play for Today.

For anybody abroad who sees this film and is familiar with the touristy London, the sight of these disgusting squalid flats and the amount of kids dealing or hooked on drugs will be shocked. Alas, I fear this is far closer to the real inner city areas than our politicians care to confess, and I pity any child who grows up in these depressing surroundings as they have very little hope.Aside from having more smackable 'people' in it than any recent film in living memory, it also provides one of the more brutal punch-ups as Wild Bill lays into the gangstas who threaten his children. Well, you'd do the same wouldn't you?It's not a great drama, with a pretty standard storyline we've all seen before in various guises and lots of shouting which is supposed to pass for acting. But it's never boring, and Charlie Creed-Miles is great as the ex-con titular character. If only all inmates could be as easily reformed as him... 6/10

Since Guy Ritchie's 1998 feature debut Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, British drama has been obsessed with clichéd gangster movies. They're relatively low cost to make, quick turnaround shoots with huge box office opportunity. Stylistically a mixture of fifties kitchen sink drama and the angry young men fronted British New Wave, the genre today has quickly become an outmoded self-parody, in desperate need of revitalising. Along comes venerable actor Dexter Fletcher. Rising from the fag ash of Guy Ritchie's Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, his first foray into filmmaking takes the same hackneyed themes of…Hackney, and tells a new story full of satire, sincerity and heart.After eight years behind bars, "Wild Bill" Hayward (Charlie Creed-Miles) returns home to his family in their tower block home. The wife is nowhere to be seen, abandoning their two children – paternal teenager Dean (Will Poulter) and his potty mouthed brother Jimmy (Sammy Williams) – for the sunny sights of Spain with her new boyfriend.A tough nestle back in to normality, the broken home soon leads to social services reps (Jaime Winstone and Jason Flemyng) asking questions. They fend them off by pretending to play happy families, but the bossy Dean tells his work-shy dad to go straight and get a job. Doing porridge has changed the ex-drug dealer, but unfortunately the apple doesn't fall far from the tree as Jimmy is accosted by local thug Terry (Leo Gregory) as a drug mule. Fighting for his freedom on the outside, Bill steps back in to the game, saving his son and taking a quick crash course on parenthood in the process.Whilst the story is far from revolutionary, Fletcher and his writing partner Danny King have crafted a truly excellent script, which is neither excessively ghettoized, nor saccharine. The good works lead to good performances too, particularly from Son of Rambow's Bill Poultner, showing great range as the apathetic teenager turned surrogate father figure. Virtually a non-budget movie, it's clear that Fletcher went through the phonebook and asked for a few favours of his supporting cast. Everyone's here: the compelling Olivia Williams as the concerned social worker, Sean Pertwee as the no-nonsense constable who through Bill in the slammer those eight years ago and, best of all, Andy Serkis puts down the motion capture play things for a menacing performance as an East London mafioso. I wish he put down the motion capture play things and started doing more straight-up screen performances; his animated face-acting is always a scene stealer.Unfortunately there is some duds amongst all the finite work. Misfits' Iwan Rhoen is insufferable as a slang-tastic hoodlum – so much that he even starts to annoy his co-stars. Newcomer Liz White's turn as an abused call girl is too flippant and lacks character depth. The biggest disappointment comes from Wild Bill himself. Sublime as a drugged-up Billy incarnate in Gary Oldman's Nil by Mouth, he is too emotionally uncharged throughout.Evenstill, it's still a brilliant debut from Fletcher. Working on film sets since the young age of ten when he played Baby Face in Alan Parker's Bugsy Malone, he clearly has a deep insight of how to craft a story, shoot a scene and carve out some solid performances. All that, plus a great ska fever soundtrack and the best pub-fight sequence since Shaun of the Dead. It's as good as a gangster film can get. Let's hope he puts down the faux-Burberry scarves and trade them in for invigorated, ambitious new material.Read more reviews now at www.366movies.com

On the one hand, I loved the story. Irresponsible father reconnecting with his family and cleaning up the children's mess. But on the other hand he got busted in the end by law enforcers. Hey, are those law enforcers really so lawless? The law, I would like to hope, tries to be more humane and those who enforce it are put there to compensate its flaws. That what is usually praised in the films. As in 'Derailed', 'The Departed', let alone other innumerable examples. In those films police, when stumbles upon a conflict between the written law and justice, looks into the situation and makes a just choice. In 'Wild Bill' law enforcement is shown as some inhuman, mechanical force, careless of justice. And it cannot be even communicated with. They are just there and act as if they are robots. They represent some higher, inanimate power, or is it just safe for me to think of them as of something inanimate, because if I had believed that they are real alive people, it would destroy my worldview? I think that is why no one of police officers is ever shown in the film. Because no one would ever believe that human beings can act like this. All this reminds me of Dostoevski books, in which the author always puts characters in some totally unrealistic situations that make them to make hard decisions, to choose the less of two evils. Situations like the one Bill was put in. Such stories are very sob-inducing, hence are considered to be powerful stuff by readers and viewers. So that what 'Wild Bill' essentially is. A sob-inducing machine. I do not like that. I feel manipulated and stripped of my time. Although, I liked the acting.