We are all products of our environment. Some environments are just harder to survive in.
Welcome to London, 2012. Home of the Olympic Games. Behind the veil of newly injected prosperity lies a community that's impossible to enter and even harder to escape.
Wringing tortured turns from a cast of unknowns, Drew has things to say – and he mostly says them well.
Jarring, grimy and a searing indictment of Broken Britain.
It’s ambitious and impassioned but so didactic that it feels like a Ken Loach snack.
As gritty, urban British crime dramas go, this is a good ’un. It may be slow in parts and its heart-sinking scenarios won’t fill you with cheer, but it has bags of style and a terrific soundtrack from promising debut director Drew. It might just kickstart a few acting careers, too.
It's as if someone has set the sat nav to Parody Street and gone several miles beyond. Depressing.
Ludicrously overblown, stylised to within an inch of its life and loaded with every visual cliché in the book, it would be laugh-out-loud funny were it not so relentlessly and unpleasantly grim.
Ill Manors looks like many other British urban crime films; it could have been made at almost any time, and there's not much substance under the urban style.
Hard-hitting in all the worst ways, like being repeatedly thumped by a randomly furious street hawker. What Drew is mainly selling is his own reputation as a poet of the disaffected, but we needn’t buy it. Not on this evidence.
Worst-ever British gangster film?
Ill Manors is not perfect and can only leave you feeling appalled and depressed about the state of the nation but there are still enough powerful moments, strong performances and film flourishes to make it well worth seeing.
By the final reel, as a baby is caught in a blazing fire, an already overwrought film strays fatally into the realm of Victorian melodrama.
Despite having too many characters – and too many rap numbers introducing them – you’re still left relishing Drew’s next project.
It is the film's socio-political awareness, rather than its flashy visual tics or its soundtrack, that sets it apart from similar urban youth dramas.
The fractured chronology would have been more commendable if he'd mastered basic pacing, plotting, lighting and editing first.
Ill Manors is pretty well made, with a well-orchestrated narrative and a strong sense of place. But despite the solemn self-importance conveyed by rapper-turned-director Ben Drew (aka Plan B), it feels like the latest example of what I've come to regard as "sink estate porn".
It's a harsh, forceful film, directed with considerable confidence, but I'm not persuaded by these encomia that it really ploughs new ground.
Drew may be the Jarvis Cocker or Damon Albarn of today’s austerity youth.
Mean streets at the movies
They'll risk their future by stealing a pair of trainers, so why do so many kids not care?
Now it's all going to Plan
Plan B: 'I love directing. But does my art change lives? I don't think it does'.
General release. Check local listings for show times.