Well, this is a nice change of pace – a found-footage crime film. I have seen them before, but they are pretty few a far between. There’s more chance of a profit from a horror film, as horror geeks will just about watch anything. I have to admit though that making a drama, or a crime movie would be potentially easier to make. You just need an ‘in’ and a reason for the camera and you’re off to the races.
As ESSEX BOYS shows though, it’s not quite as easy as that.
ESSEX BOYS finds a group of rough-and-tumble friends back together again after the jail release of one of them. It doesn’t take long for the friends to get back to their old routine of drugs, women, and crime, though. After they find themselves with a video camera they begin to film everything, and this is how we witness their world. They try to portray themselves as fun-loving guys just trying to get by to their girlfriends but at night they are partying hard, messing with women, and working schemes and scams to get money. The problem is that among all of this, they borrow money from a local gangster and their low-level hits on scams are not enough to pay it back. As the group begins to turn on one another, and their nastier sides reveal themselves, it seems like we’re viewing a document of their downfall.
As I try to always say, it’s an act of sheer willpower and fortitude to make a film. It’s not easy, no matter the level you’re working at, and that someone made a film and was able to release it deserves applause.
That doesn’t make every movie good though.
And this is a bad one.
If you have a hard time with the “shaky cam” style of film then this is a film to skip. The movie is out of focus, is over-zoomed, hard to hear, and feels too much like it was an act of improvisation and not plotting. I will say that much of this could be intentional, to show that these were “ordinary blokes” who found a camera and didn’t know how to use it or what to do with it. OK, fair enough, but the fact is that it makes the movie hard to understand and harder to connect with.
These are loutish men behaving terribly.
The acting is relatively believable, and the vignettes are moderately realistic but the fact is that if these are guys that get into trouble – why on earth are they filming everything? In the least, why is there not one of them that protests the constant filming?
It’s asking a lot.
This is an awful film. The movie consists of watching shaky, blurry footage of these men swearing at one another, doing drugs, talking about their big plans, and little else. It is presented as the footage that was discovered of these men after the fact, and when we know what’s coming we just wait for it to play out. As it plays out though it all ends with a huge shrug.
There’s no genuine tension in the film and no real scenes of the “boys” really doing much more than partying and bullying.
What the film feels like is an attempt to cash in on a crime scene in Essex and in several gangster films set in Essex.
There’s no reason to watch this.
Seeing that it’s not the filmmaker’s first film really makes me wonder what the point of this was. I certainly don’t want to be mean about it, but there’s no tension, no drama, frustrating filming, and nothing memorable about the film with a lazy wrap-up.
Hard pass.
.25 out of 5
The Spooky World of Chris Ringler 