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City Rats
The lives of a handful of Londoners collide and collapse in this multi-stranded drama starring Danny Dyer
There are seven-and-a-half million stories waiting to be told about life in the capital, and City Rats locates about eight of them. A low budget drama by a writer and director both making their feature debut, it's an uneven but ambitious enterprise which, like its characters, never knows which way to turn, or how best to exploit its own strengths. Pete (Danny Dyer) is a drink-drenched ex-con haunted by a crime he hasn't quite finished paying for. Gina (Susan Lynch) is a prostitute in callipers who lives in the flat above Hoxton-haired artist Dean (Ray Panthaki), who dreams of making her his muse. Olly (Kenny Doughty) is an earnest young guy with a few bad habits who finds himself looking after his deaf, autistic brother Chris (James Lance), who's clear about his sexual orientation in a way Olly definitely isn't. Jim (Tamer Hassan) is a drunken, suicidal divorcee hurling watermelons off a roof in order to work out the best trajectory for his own leap into the dark. Sammy (MyAnna Buring) is Dean's ex and she's also had enough of life. Carol (Natasha Williams) is the middle-aged mother who holds the key to Pete's past. As director Steve Kelly and writer Simon Fantauzzo's film unfolds, the ties which bind these lives together grow gradually more tangled, and in the process the film seeks to say something Crash-like about atomised individuals, urban anxiety and walking your own line through the alleys, lock-ups and riverside walkways which form City Rats' artfully grimy backdrop. Ambitious though City Rats is, its broad scope precludes any real focus, and some decent actors - notably the ever-potent Danny Dyer and the Lena Headey -like Susan Lynch - are forced to contend with some first-draft dialogue which no amount of atmospheric cinematography can prevent from hanging flatly in the air. James Lance, as a silent autistic guy not quite losing his virginity to a Soho rent boy, is the other curious casting choice in a film which seems perversely determined to challenge its cast. The whole Rain Man thing may have presented an intriguing prospect to Lance, an actor whose roles are generally defined by his fabulous good looks and ability to make smarm look seductive, but here he's so underemployed as to be practically redundant. More frustrating is the sense that none of the story's branches grow very naturally out of each other - a suspicion which the final revelation, delivered out of the blue, does little to displace. Flawed though the writing and structure is, the filmmakers nevertheless invest the London landscape and its misty skyline with an intriguing sense of noir-tinged urban drama which suggests a Guy Ritchie film snatched away by Alex Cox, or photographer Rankin's unclassifiable London film The Lives Of The Saints - both are thrillers that want to be read as fables, both sweeten their grit with sharp cinematography, and both stumble precariously between genre and arty self-consciousness. Finally, you sense that this is a film grounded not in any experience of real life, but in the filmmakers' own love of films. That leaves City Rats looking like an oddly inauthentic slice of dirty realism, but the look and atmosphere are frequently impressive, and the whole thing stands as yet another reminder of Danny Dyer's ability to kick life into anything that comes his way. Verdict An uneven but intriguing debut dominated and redeemed - almost - by Danny Dyer. |
