Good for Adam Deacon: It was about time the English actor, rapper and filmmaker caught a break after years of living and working in the shadow of Noel Clarke on the films that made him (beginning with 2006’s Kidulthood, a teen crime drama based on Clarke’s experiences of growing up in Ladbroke Grove) and almost broke him. Sumotherhood, Deacon’s sophomore feature and loose sequel to his 2011 comedy Anuvahood, gives the filmmaker a fighting chance to stand on his own two feet, and prove he’s had the guts all along. That the film is not very good almost feels besides the point.
The premise sees Deacon’s bipolar Londoner Riko and his loyal if slightly naive best friend Kane (Jazzie Zonzolo) on a quest to be taken seriously as roadmen by getting out of debt and maybe (Riko) even getting the girl, Tamara (Leomie Anderson). Director and co-writer Deacon feels his way through a messy string of what might work nicely as sketch vignettes instead of an actual feature – but if you know who and what you’re in for as you part with your cash at the ticket counter, it’s hard to not crack at least one smile.
That smile absolutely would not be due to Ed Sheeran’s horrifying extended cameo as a manic homeless man, a portrayal that seems destined to cause offence both to those who sleep rough and, well, maybe literally anyone who isn’t him, with his feral vulgarity and desperate (read: failed) attempt at humour with repulsive results, nor from the pantomimic antagonist Tyrese (Richie Campbell), Tamara’s gun-toting gangster stepbrother, positively frothing at the mouth to Die Hard his way into knocking Riko and Kane off the face of the Earth.
But Deacon is undoubtedly funny, confident in both his understanding of and right to completely rip the piss out of the London crime dramas that made his name, and all the wannabe gangsters within them. He shares writing credits with co-star Zonzolo and Anuvahood collaborator Michael Vu, who clearly appreciate Deacon’s need for catharsis and closure.
It’s somehow Jennifer Saunders, popping up briefly with a good empowering monologue in a cameo as a police officer, who speaks to the societal injustices that Deacon (and, frankly, almost anybody working in the UK film industry) will have faced over the years, in thinly veiled condemnations of workplace misconduct as well as misogyny. It’s both bold and sweet in a film as unapologetically brash and excessive as this, proof that over a decade since Deacon’s last feature and just a couple of years since Clarke’s fall from grace, a few things are still true: Deacon never really needed anybody else to put him on the map; he’ll always have someone to fight his corner; you never really know when Jeremy Corbyn might pop up. An abrasive time at the pictures that somehow truly does deserve its spot.
97 mins, cert 15
