North v South

To some extent, North v South can be seen as a gang­land reimag­in­ing of ​‘Romeo and Juli­et’, telling the sto­ry of two lovers caught between war­ring Eng­lish crime fam­i­lies. It is nar­rat­ed for the most part by pro­tag­o­nist Ter­ry Singer (Elliot Tit­ten­sor), one of the top cap­tains of a North­ern syn­di­cate despite being, by his own admis­sion, a lit­tle soft for organ­ised crime.

He is in a secret rela­tion­ship with Wil­low (Char­lotte Hope) the daugh­ter of an infa­mous king­pin from the South (Steven Berkoff). Com­pared to the wild­ly pas­sion­ate lovers in Shakespeare’s play, how­ev­er, Ter­ry and Wil­low mere­ly seem sick­ly sweet. Their romance is pared down to a few twee flash­backs and some sop­py dia­logue, ulti­mate­ly serv­ing as sec­ond fid­dle to the gang­ster antics.

Thank­ful­ly, the per­for­mances are con­sid­er­ably bet­ter than the script. Vet­er­an actors Bernard Hill, Oliv­er Cot­ton and Kei­th Allen are per­fect cast­ings as schem­ing mob boss­es, while Freema Agye­man gives a note­wor­thy turn as a mul­ti­lin­gual extor­tion and weapons spe­cial­ist named Pen­ny. In an homage to Luc Besson’s 1994 film Léon, she agrees to train up a young orphaned girl, played by the promis­ing Syd­ney Wade.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, though, fine act­ing can­not dis­guise the film’s many fail­ings. Writer/​director Steven Nes­bit cre­ates an array of char­ac­ters – rang­ing from ruth­less thugs to a trans­ves­tite hit­man – all of whom seem to flaunt cru­el, mani­a­cal or obnox­ious traits. (Even when Ter­ry vis­its his ter­mi­nal­ly ill moth­er, in a scene intend­ed to endear us to the lead­ing man, she man­ages to shoe­horn in a racist com­ment about ​“bloody Arabs”.) Yet he fails to make them seem like any­thing more than two-dimen­sion­al car­i­ca­tures, all appar­ent­ly com­pet­ing to be a lit­tle more psy­cho­path­ic than the other.

As a con­se­quence, the film feels some­how unstruc­tured. For instance a sub­plot emerges, when one South­ern crew mem­ber sug­gests mutiny, before dis­si­pat­ing with­out hint of res­o­lu­tion. Like­wise, the bag­gy nar­ra­tive often relies on Ter­ry to explain what is going on. The roman­tic voiceover is a sta­ple of the genre, hav­ing been deployed suc­cess­ful­ly in gang­ster films from Mar­tin Scorsese’s Good­fel­las to Guy Ritchie’s Snatch; but in North v South, it does lit­tle to enhance the film.

Nes­bit fre­quent­ly over­lays slow-motion sequences with wind­ing mono­logues, in which Ter­ry intro­duces pre­vi­ous­ly undis­closed infor­ma­tion that always proves a lit­tle too con­ve­nient. At oth­er points, his nar­ra­tive voice becomes omni­scient, like a nov­el­ist divulging infor­ma­tion that Ter­ry him­self would not know, such as when he nar­rates a riv­et­ing heli­copter-chase despite being entire­ly absent from the scene. Rather than pro­vid­ing extra insight or adding a lay­er of depth to the char­ac­ter, the nar­ra­tor instead serves to reit­er­ate plot points and con­ceal the holes in the film’s own structure.