Film Reviews

NEDs

• Rating:
• Director: Peter Mullan
• Starring: Peter Mullan
• Details: UK / 124mins (18).

Violent teen dramas are ten-a-penny with Scum, The Wanderers, Away Days, Bad Boys, A Clockwork Orange, Made In Britain, Bully and This Is England to name just a few. Neds (Non-Educated DelinquentS) is the latest, but writer-director-actor Peter Mullan manages to find pockets of originality in this "personal but not autobiographical" film. But even if he didn't, introducing the world to newcomer Conor McCarron was worth making the movie alone.
It's Glasgow, 1972, and young John McGill (Forrest) has just graduated from primary school; the brother of the notorious Benny (Joey Szula), the studious John couldn't be more different with a bright future ahead of him. However, the teachers in his new school, with their humiliating tactics and liberal use of the belt, are bullies and no comfort can be found at home, where John's abused mother (Goodall) is still loyal to his drunken father (Mullan). Slowly, John (who has grown up into McCarron) is sucked into the gang that hang out on his estate, and his twitchy personality is always in danger of tipping him over into a full-blown sociopath.
Neds is a socially conscious violence-inherited-in-the system film but Mullan, in his third outing as a director (after Orphans and The Magdalene Sisters), delivers a character so compelling that even when he's slicing faces and dropping gravestones on heads, John doesn't lose the audience's affections. Mullan directs these fight scenes without flair or style, making them all too horribly real. John's transformation from a rosy-cheeked, shy teenager into the dead-eyed, blade-waving thug doesn't go as smoothly as Mullan would hope, but once that awkward transition is made it's plain sailing... until the story gets shaky towards the close for reasons this review can't get into for spoiler reasons.
To single out one performance in a movie that has many is hard but it's McCarron that makes it easy to forgive Neds' clunkier moments. A dead ringer for a young Ray Winstone, McCarron has a cool and confident power that belies his experience. Able to spit Mullan's tough dialogue (the Glasgow accent is at times hard to understand) with ease, McCarron's talent really shines when he's asked to say everything with his eyes: one scene sees him confront his father with only a steely gaze. Spine-shivering stuff.

Review by Gavin Burke