Steve Kelly’s City Rats deals in urban despair. It begins with a young man throwing melons off a roof to see what kind of a splat will result.
He’s thinking about suicide but when he sees a girl on an adjacent roof just about to throw herself off, he makes friends with her and the two wander the capital with other lost souls, including a painter with no apparent talent, a prostitute, a gay and a deaf-mute.
Danny Dyer, Susan Lynch and Tamer Hassan do their best to convince but City Rats is never more than a compendium of clichés hoping to amuse and move us. In the end it does neither. In Shifty, we see people virtually at the end of their tether, often not knowing it, and there’s just enough common humanity in them to extract our sympathy in a tough dog-eat-dog world where there are few winners.
City Rats also suggests that London is full of no-hopers desperately striving for some sort of life — but in the end, you feel they scarcely deserve one.
City Rats
Cert: 15
