London lad Ash, or Sparks as he’s known by his mates, is living a life of crime. He has his reasons, but treats it all as a bit of a joke, eyeing up girls at parties and daydreaming, until things take a handbrake turn and those dreams become nightmares in director George Amponsah’s feature debut Gassed Up, which has its world premiere on Tuesday evening as part of the BFI London Film Festival.
Amponsah burst onto the scene with The Hard Stop, his searing documentary on the killing of Mark Duggan, which was nominated in 2017 for a BAFTA in the category Outstanding Debut by a British Writer, Director or Producer.
With Gassed Up, he revisits London’s criminal underbelly, this time focusing on a moped gang who steal phones and valuables from the public before trading them for cash. The gang is led by Taz Skylar’s Dubz, and Stephen Odubola (both he and Skylar star in Boiling Point; the former TV series, the latter the movie) plays Ash, who has carved out a regular, if precarious, living, alongside him.
Ash’s life is complicated. He’s dealing with an entirely absent father, a mostly absent mother and a dependent, precocious younger sister. He’s trying to raise £25,000 for his mother’s rehab – of course he is. Amponsah is at pains to stress his ‘hero’ is doing his highly dubious work for all the right reasons.
Dubz’s cousin Shaz (Jelena Gavrilovic) is Gassed Up’s femme fatale; a humourless, seductive vixen with eyes of steel, flanked by her bald heavies and given a thick Albanian accent. The lads are in thrall to her, handing over their stolen goods, but inevitably she’s harbouring a dark side.
Still, the going is good for Ash and for the gang until they target a local mechanic. Ash’s best friend Roach, (played by Craige Middleburg), the group’s token loose cannon (every gang needs one), throws acid on the luckless man, causing him serious injuries. Ash is urged to kick his friend out of the group, just as the stakes for their robberies get even higher. Predictably, things rapidly go from bad to worse. Haven’t we seen this somewhere before?
Far from saying anything new, Gassed Up falls repeatedly into cliché. Roach is given some backstory (read: expository explanation) for his explosive anger and propensity to violence – an abusive and alcoholic father, again, see what I mean? – but it’s one scene, then it’s scarcely mentioned again. This is just a plodding dance across ground far better-trodden in the remarkable Netflix show Top Boy.
Odubola does his best, especially in the latter third of the film, as his world threatens to come apart. His PTSD-like terror of death, his wild mood swings, his self-loathing, are all ably embodied by the young actor. But every twist and turn of the story feels tired and predictable and every other character is paper-thin.
The wheeze of mounting GoPro cameras onto the mopeds for the robberies adds energy in fits and starts, but ultimately this a spluttering effort that never reaches top speed.
102 mins, cert 15
