Hyena (18.)
Directed by Gerard Johnson.
Starring Peter Ferdinando, Stephen Graham, Neil Maskell, MyAnne Buring and Tony Pitts. 112 mins.
They are not exactly the De Niro and Scorsese of North London but the Ferdinando/ Johnson combo attack their topics with a similar drive and gusto, but not so much finesse. In their previous pairing, Tony, they took a Dennis Nielsen type figure and built in a dour, English, miserablist Portrait of a Serial Killer around him. The follow up is a frenzied, Bent Coppers drama which effs and blinds, snorts and sniffs, chops and bawls around patches of Queensway with a berserk energy and fevered sense of urgency.
They are a skilled combo but they walk a well trodden patch. Michael (Ferdinando) is our bent copper, a policeman who is moving in a southward direction at a determined and rapid pace. He leads a little gang of bent coppers – the kind of coppers who used to take apples from the market to put under their helmets for later and now expect a 30% cut if you want to bring shipments of cocaine into the country. His business take a turn for the worse when his Turkish partners find themselves subject to a very hostile takeover bid by some Albanian brothers. And then there is a corruption inquiry to be dealt with.
Hyena has a top cast and is forcefully directed but it goes about trying to stand out from the crowd of British crime dramas in the most obvious way possible – by being more intense, more violent, more sweary, more despairing and more nihilistic than the others. But if you're trying to be more real than the others then you have to believable and there are various places where you suspect the necessary paper work isn't in order, where the police work wouldn't stand up in a court of law. Most notably being the constant assertion that Michael is a good cop when he seems to be coked up or drunk pretty much all the time.
As a director Johnson definitely has some moves, an instinctive talent, but while Hyena is a proficient thriller it doesn't become anything more than that. He seems a little too chuffed with the soundtrack by his brother Matt Johnson (The The) and he allows it to take over in a number of non-dialogue sequences. They are effective but whenever Johnson tries to do something a little bit different, something to mark out his film as special, they tend to remind you of other British directors (Ben Wheatley being the obvious reference point here) who can do it more effectively.
The film is a blistering, sour vision of modern London, but is reassuring in as much as it seems like the levels of bent copperdom haven't got any worse over the last thirty years, or whenever it was the bent copper became a recurrent figure in the culture. Michael and his mates' escapades might have shocked then, but planting evidence, setting up criminals, stealing drugs is run of the mill these days. What has definitely got worse though is the brutality of the criminals. The Albanians are degenerate monsters, sex traders, people and drug traffickers with no regard for any human lives beyond themselves, and even theirs they don't seem overly concerned about. The film's message seems to be that our corrupt, lazy, selfish coppers have gone soft and aren't nearly scummy or ruthless enough to deal with the reality of modern crime. We need a new DeGeneration of Swine.
Directed by Gerard Johnson.
Starring Peter Ferdinando, Stephen Graham, Neil Maskell, MyAnne Buring and Tony Pitts. 112 mins.
They are not exactly the De Niro and Scorsese of North London but the Ferdinando/ Johnson combo attack their topics with a similar drive and gusto, but not so much finesse. In their previous pairing, Tony, they took a Dennis Nielsen type figure and built in a dour, English, miserablist Portrait of a Serial Killer around him. The follow up is a frenzied, Bent Coppers drama which effs and blinds, snorts and sniffs, chops and bawls around patches of Queensway with a berserk energy and fevered sense of urgency.
They are a skilled combo but they walk a well trodden patch. Michael (Ferdinando) is our bent copper, a policeman who is moving in a southward direction at a determined and rapid pace. He leads a little gang of bent coppers – the kind of coppers who used to take apples from the market to put under their helmets for later and now expect a 30% cut if you want to bring shipments of cocaine into the country. His business take a turn for the worse when his Turkish partners find themselves subject to a very hostile takeover bid by some Albanian brothers. And then there is a corruption inquiry to be dealt with.
Hyena has a top cast and is forcefully directed but it goes about trying to stand out from the crowd of British crime dramas in the most obvious way possible – by being more intense, more violent, more sweary, more despairing and more nihilistic than the others. But if you're trying to be more real than the others then you have to believable and there are various places where you suspect the necessary paper work isn't in order, where the police work wouldn't stand up in a court of law. Most notably being the constant assertion that Michael is a good cop when he seems to be coked up or drunk pretty much all the time.
As a director Johnson definitely has some moves, an instinctive talent, but while Hyena is a proficient thriller it doesn't become anything more than that. He seems a little too chuffed with the soundtrack by his brother Matt Johnson (The The) and he allows it to take over in a number of non-dialogue sequences. They are effective but whenever Johnson tries to do something a little bit different, something to mark out his film as special, they tend to remind you of other British directors (Ben Wheatley being the obvious reference point here) who can do it more effectively.
The film is a blistering, sour vision of modern London, but is reassuring in as much as it seems like the levels of bent copperdom haven't got any worse over the last thirty years, or whenever it was the bent copper became a recurrent figure in the culture. Michael and his mates' escapades might have shocked then, but planting evidence, setting up criminals, stealing drugs is run of the mill these days. What has definitely got worse though is the brutality of the criminals. The Albanians are degenerate monsters, sex traders, people and drug traffickers with no regard for any human lives beyond themselves, and even theirs they don't seem overly concerned about. The film's message seems to be that our corrupt, lazy, selfish coppers have gone soft and aren't nearly scummy or ruthless enough to deal with the reality of modern crime. We need a new DeGeneration of Swine.
