Anti-Social

Taking inspiration from news reports about burka-wearing armed gangs smashing and grabbing their way through department stores and shopping malls, this caricature of an East End gangster flick is more comical than tense and remarkably soft-edged in its brutality. Josh Myers (grandson of the real Michael Myers, the UK distributor John Carpenter named his Halloween maniac after) plays the serial robber who drags his sensible, Banksy-like street artist brother (Gregg Sulkin) into the shady underworld. Directed and scripted by Reg Traviss (Screwed), this artless thriller meanders for nearly two long hours between badly staged action and "keeping it real" dialogue, summed up perfectly by a gang rape intercut with an intense philosophical discussion on the meaning of art. Traviss is clearly searching for cockney cool and "lots of layers, like life" but can't find either in the one-note flimsiness of the plastic plot that's worsened by weak ensemble acting.