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Bullet Boy (2004)

Bullet Boy (2004)

GENRESDrama
LANGEnglish
ACTOR
Ashley WaltersLuke FraserLeon BlackClare Perkins
DIRECTOR
Saul Dibb

SYNOPSICS

Bullet Boy (2004) is a English movie. Saul Dibb has directed this movie. Ashley Walters,Luke Fraser,Leon Black,Clare Perkins are the starring of this movie. It was released in 2004. Bullet Boy (2004) is considered one of the best Drama movie in India and around the world.

In one of East London's most volatile neighborhoods, pride, rivalry and revenge are the only codes on the street. Touted as a British Boyz in the Hood, Bullet Boy is a gripping and authentic drama that takes an unflinching look at two troubled, street-smart boys. Fresh out of jail, 18-year-old Ricky (Ashley Walters, Get Rich or Die Tryin') and his 12-year-old brother, Curtis, struggle to walk the straight and narrow when a minor street clash escalates into an all-out neighborhood war. For Ricky and Curtis, friendships, family and loyalty will be tested to the extreme in a world where guns are a fact of everyday life and boys try to be men before they're even teenagers. Music by Massive Attack.

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Bullet Boy (2004) Reviews

  • Brilliant if you're a Londoner

    squeakyorm2005-01-14

    I wasn't expecting too much of this film before I saw it, but I have to say I was wrong to think it would be dull. Although American audiences -- and, in fact, non-London-dwelling audiences -- probably won't appreciate it for its wonderful depiction of east London, I find myself for once thankful that I live in Hackney. Some scenes around the Hackney Marshes and Lea Valley are astonishingly lush, to the extent that I had my doubts they were actually filmed there, because they present such a contrast to the grubby streets I'm used to, and which are portrayed in other parts of the film. One of the other things that struck me was the accuracy of the dialogue -- I know this sounds a bit silly, but it's easy to get wrong, and in Bullet Boy there wasn't a word out of place. Lines like "that dog's like my brethren" are faintly amusing, but people do actually speak like that, and Bullet Boy got it exactly right. I think Bullet Boy is a beautiful film, and have in fact only one gripe besides perhaps its inaccessibility for people who aren't English: the editing-over of a sign at a train station from the station name to 'Platform 2'. I'm an appalling pedant.

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  • Magnificent

    Axaxaxas_mlo2005-03-13

    Bullet Boy is the sort of film that deserves to be seen by far more people than are, unfortunately, ever likely to see it. It's utterly gripping the whole way through - almost every scene is filled an unbearably tense air of looming tragedy, as events spiral out of control. The cast (a mixture of professionals and non-actors) all give superb, deeply honest performances, most notably Ashley Walters and Claire Perkins. Where most British films that strive for an air of realism fail by simply trying too hard, laying on the "grittiness" far too thick, Bullet Boy always seems completely natural, unforced and unfailingly true-to-life. While it's undeniably a fairly bleak and upsetting tale, the film is never boring, never depressing, never anything less than wholly involving. Crafting something genuinely special with a very limited budget, this is a great feature debut from documentary maker Dibb. You shouldn't see Bullet Boy because it's an "issue" film (although the issue it addresses is extremely important); you should see it because it's a brilliant film.

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  • Going straight, innit?

    paul2001sw-12006-04-26

    'Bullet Boy' is an understated drama about an ex-convict trying to go straight in London's black community. The piece is nicely assembled and acted, and makes good visual use of its Hackney setting, but there's nothing in the story which is ultimately surprising. I also have one quibble: the film features a fair amount of gun usage, but we don't see any underlying criminal activity, which is (I think) usually the root cause of shootings. On the other hand, one strength is that the world of the characters is not depicted as a squalid ghetto, but rather as a place in which one can imagine real people living in. Overall, this is not a bad film; but it is a little bland.

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  • Treads familiar path but is worthy in the face of the UK's film and music scene obsession with making gun culture "cool"

    bob the moo2005-04-19

    Having served his time for stabbing another teenager, Ricky is released from prison and collected by his little brother and his friend Wisdom. Arriving back in London, Wisdom accidentally damages a car of another young man, but Ricky makes him walk away when things escalate towards a fight. However, when Wisdom realises that the word on the street is that he is a p*ssy, he revisits the young man and shoots his dog dead. Ricky tries to resolve the situation to avoid getting drawn back into the violence that landed him in jail in the first place. Meanwhile, younger brother Curtis watches all these things with admiring eyes. Basically if you can't work out where the film is headed just from my very basic plot summary then you simply haven't seen enough American ghetto movies and indeed, one of the weaknesses in this film is that it is predictable from not only the moment it starts, but even the moment you are in the lobby looking at the poster. The message is simple but an important one and it is one of the reasons you should try and see it. That it is predictable is surprisingly not a problem and somehow the film is still engaging throughout – and I'm not entirely sure why it manages to do it. I think what carries the film is how very natural and down to earth the whole thing is; it feels like real life, the characters feel like real people and for this reason it is engaging because we, the audience, care even if deep inside we know where it is going. The writing and direction is a big part of making this work. The writing takes the "no way out of the ghetto" cliché and puts it across in such a way that it is not glamorised; the violence starts over nothing and is never anything more than petty and a total waste of time. The small scale of everything within the story is also engaging – the violence is not between "gangstas" "rolling" in "Escalades" or "Lexus" but rather teenagers who live in tiny flats with basic furniture and minor drug habits. Although the sentiment may match those of characters in "hood" movies, the real sense of the small is effective and convincing. The direction helps this, with no flashy camera-work and the feeling of London streets and cramped flats. To me this realism was important mainly because, in the UK, we are constantly assailed by a presentation of reality in R'n'B music of bling, expensive cars and women in shorts; meanwhile UK cinema we have an obsession on cool guns and gangsters that comes from "Lock, Stock" and countless copies. If anything the overwhelming of the market with such images and hype make it all the more important to have a film like Bullet Boy do good business to counter it. Ironically, lead actor Walters is one of those that has had a part in presenting a life that is outside of the reach of nearly all of us (fast cars, guns, violence, drugs and girls) by his part in videos and songs with So Solid Crew. Indeed the group themselves have had their fair share of headlines over shootings and cars and I would like to think that in some way this film was a decision Walters made to try and redress the balance. Regardless of his motives though, Walters is strong; he is natural and convincing as a black teenager in a high rise world of posturing and trivia and he does it without glamorising it or showing a concern for keeping up his So Solid personae or image. He is given good support from Perkins, Fraser and Black among others – all of whom add to the feeling of a convincing portrayal of daily reality for many. They don't feel the need to play up to black stereotypes of anger and hardships and they are simply convincingly real people. Overall this is a predictable film that treads a very familiar path but the natural delivery in all aspects mean it come across as convincing and engaging – simply put, we care and we stay with it for that reason. If nothing else, see it to try and counteract the perversion of reality and glamorisation of violence that is pushed in the name of selling records.

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  • Moving, with a bite of realism and a dose of moralism

    tezzzaaa2005-09-26

    I would like to start off saying that I appreciated the movie for dealing with the black community in London. No rude cockney gangsters, catchy crime scams or laughably stupid dope dealers. The family this movie deals with is a single mum home with two sons, one just out of prison, the other still too young to be involved in anything hazardous, but looking up at his brother and already copying some of his ways. I enjoyed the language and the characters who were all convincing and complex enough but, how carefully put down they were, the more obvious and stereotypical were the things happening to them. Everything going from bad to worse, who plays with fire is gonna get burnt. And then the ultimate contrast of either sinking into crime and sin (devil), or choosing the righteous path and go to church every Sunday (god). This easy moralism hurt the rest of the film. It made things predictable. It was like a newspaper article collage, one shock after the other. It took away much of the complexity that I found in the characters themselves. It really is a shame because the development of the characters could have been much more subtle and would have fit in better with the style of the movie that deals with a gritty context matter but managed to use a soft and sometimes almost dreamy camera and score, not unlike other recent British films, such a 'Morvern Callar' and '16 Years of alcohol'.

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