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This was supposed to be the most "accurate" skinhead flick. Not a bad movie at all, but I guess it's official -- skinheads do a lot of walking in slow motion. As we follow a young boy, Sean, in 1983 England (presented in a flawless montage of TV footage from the period and place that puts us right there from the beginning) as he's bullied at school and soon befriended by a crew of skins who have the 'do but not the racist obsessions, it's hard not to root for the kid.

Possibly the most gripping part of the whole tale is when Sean's alone, a fatherless and baby-faced boy who spends his time playing make believe or enjoying a small piece of candy, and anyone who can remember those lonely childhood afternoons has to be happy for him when some older kids take him under their wing, no matter what kind of haircuts they have.

The characters, especially Woody, the crew leader, are engaging and real, so much that one wishes the film would spend more time on their misadventures and youthfully wired banter than on showing them walk around to cool reggae music in slow motion. Either way, the jovial vibe is soon destroyed when Gumbo, a more business oriented skinhead, comes home from jail to represent the kind of skinhead most people think of when they hear the word.

With his unwavering beliefs and habit of convincing everyone he's just a good guy who believes in his country (he even stands up for the black guy in the crew when he says he identifies himself as English over Jamaican), Gumbo gets Sean to side with him over Woody, who goes on his own way and is sorely missed by both Sean and the audience.

While "American History X" ended up on a bit of a preachy note, at least it went deep into not only the mentality of Ed Norton's troubled and angry young man, but also his belief system when it came to racial politics. One could see how a young person, if fed one side of the whole story, could channel all their spare and bottled-up anger into the big slippery slope of a subject. Here though, we're dealing with not even really a teenager, but a small boy, and his transformation into a full-on racist is shown through... yes, more walking in slow motion, only now in a meaner outfit (and with meaner looking guys who also dress much meaner). There's even a shot of them walking forward from a brick wall. Did they just come out of the wall, you ask, or did a director just shoot it 'cause it looked cool without much thought to the logic of it all or a care of whether he was turning his almost-there movie into a lame-o music video with too much walking in slow motion? Probably the second, and the slow motion shit could've been lost along with an obnoxiously loud piano that assumes the background whenever an emotional scene's due onscreen.

Add the slow motion walking, the piano, and a final scene that licks the already wet surface of a tired, tired movie cliche ending, and there's three strikes that keep this movie from being a great one. There's also the absurdity of how the whole thing seems to take place over a matter of a few weeks. However, the good ends up outweighing the bad, enough to call "This is England" worth seeing. The humanization of its characters, even the big bad wolf that is obviously Gumbo, isn't a misfire here, and subtleties as small as a quick news clip of an English soldier drinking from a bottle of Bacardi rum make it clear that, for all its little shortcomings, this is a well thought-out piece.
 
(three bongs)

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