Boyz N The Hood was the perfect “urban gangster” film. It discussed the despair, the hopelessness, and the violence of living in the hood. Yet while you didn’t admire the way the characters in the film lived, you cared about them enough that everything else happening in the film didn’t matter as much.
It’s been a few years since John Singleton’s 1991 release and we’ve had a flurry of various knock-offs that have tried to emulate the formula of Boyz N The Hood. Kidulthood, made in the UK, paints a much bleaker picture of life in the hood. I don’t mind a variation of tone in the genre as long as there are some well-rounded characters. Kidulthood just has violence and self-destruction; no characters apparently are needed for that.
The plot centers around a group of teenagers all connected to each other due to the fact they attend the same school. When a girl at the school commits suicide because she’s bullied all the time, the school gives the kids a day off to mourn the loss of the student. Rather than sit home and feel sorry for the family of the girl who killed herself, the kids go out for a day of fun and then later that night a party at a student’s house.
In between what could have been a simple day in the life of these kids, the males in the group (Amil Ameen, Adam Deacon, Femi Oyeniran) ambush and steal from a school bully’s home (Noel Clarke) a Game Boy that was stolen by the bully from one of the kids. I find it interesting that a bunch of kids being able to ambush a bully in his own home earlier in this film have such an issue overtaking this same bully during the film’s pivotal final scenes. These scenes however are almost typical of the genre, at least when it comes to the male characters in this case. The female characters generally have little to do aside from being girlfriends to the thuggish male characters.
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