"Kidulthood" - A Review

Film - Kidulthood
Director - Menhaj Huda
Writer - Noel Clarke

I do not enjoy "Youth Reality" movies.

Before I cite it as a contributer to my anger, allow me to give KIDS a reluctant pass on the following rant. As much as I dislike the message (The kids are fucked.), it has genuine merit as a film.

Now: The Rant.

I just watched "Kidulthood", a British film about kids and the darker side of life. It's well shot and... Well, it's well shot. Sadly, it is also edited to an inconsistent pace, directed to a shaky visual mix of KIDS and Requiem for a Dream and sprinkled with a few flashback montages reminiscent of 80's action movies. It also has slow motion bad-guy-stands-up shot near the end that’s just too Die Hard to not mention. This is to say nothing of the script which is... aheh, well the script is so junked on clichés you'd think it mainlined them. I found it a struggle to watch the whole thing.

But there's a deeper reason.

Kidulthood falls into the same category as Larry Clark's KIDS, joining it in a genre that in the same breath managed to glamorize and demonize the hard inner city life as a youth. But Kidulthood lacks the focus of KIDS, taking on the philosophy of 'High School is a war zone' but accelerating it to a ridiculous level; showing every child around trying to just get through with their head down or narcotize themselves through their adolescence like the Viet Cong had sprung an ambush and killed their third best friend this month.

I'm not calling hyperbole on the situation the movie addresses, just on the movie. I am aware that in some places going to school is the most dangerous part of a young person's day; old enough to be exposed to dangers but still too young to mount a strong defense. Sadly Kidulthood, so full of stereotypical parental disengagement that every generation seems to think is a new epidemic serves not to act as a wake up call to the world, as movies like Boyz In The Hood did for black on black youth violence but is simply a dour, nihilistic gloom-fest promoted as the dark, hard reality that everybody has blinded themselves to. All the kids have AIDS, they peddle firearms as favors and terrify their teachers with a look so hard it could freeze water. The world is their playground, as painted by Hieronymus Bosch.

But concepts of solution? Redemption? Improvement in their lives? The good things that every kid wants even if they've convinced themselves they'll never have? Nada. At the end of this movie as with just about every one like it I inevitably felt like I'd just swilled down some junkie bohemians' coffee after the physical embodiment of self-pity had taken a piss in it. Films like this don't leave me horrified, concerned for the future of my unborn children or saddened by the state of the world as according to the director. They leave me angry.

Billed with adjectives such as gritty and realistic, I find them to be, in reality, failed attempts at tragedy born out of someone forgetting that a tragedy requires a hero trying to do the right thing and failing because they are flawed. Instead we get children with a sociopath's sense of morality ending up victims of a conglomeration of sad events that might happen to a small town's worth of people over the course of a month but instead happen to a van's worth of people in the course of a day. When taken from a distance I can imagine these being the people you would laugh shamefully at as you read about them in the news, the ones you get drunk and tell your friends about with the preface, "You think you're unlucky? Jesus, lemme tell you about this kid I read about." And everyone listens with a sense of car-crash horror, laughing and moaning in turn every time the story comes to its next part, "But wait, there's more!"