Mickey (Stephen Reilly) is a labourer who wants much more out of life. When he meets Kenny (Johnny Wilson) in a bar, he finds himself with a sideline gig of peddling drugs for gang boss Luther (Peter Hirst) but Mickey wants much more than that and, if he’s going to take risks, he’d like to be at the top of the tree rather than being thrown scraps from up on high. Does Mickey have what it takes to wipe out everyone standing in his way and fall to the top?
Once again, we’re on those mean streets of London and we’re back in gangster territory, but Fall To The Top brings a more regional flavour to the usual diet of booze, drugs, knives and shooters. It takes me right back to the shot on video stylings of Mancunian movie mogul Cliff Twemlow’s delirious 80s crime epic GBH. Yes, this one was filmed in 4K rather than VHS – affordable camera tech has moved on – but all of that decades-old grunge, grime and gumption to make something from nothing is resurrected in an all hands on deck, genuinely guerrilla filmmaking project.
Up front, I need to say this. Fall To The Top is rough around the edges and if some of its technical side happens to feel like the cast and crew were learning on the job, well, they were learning on the job. If you’re looking for the sheen and polished wisecracking of an early Guy Ritchie caper, you won’t believe your mince pies. This is scuzzy, off the cuff stuff. It also has Paul Chuckle as the fever dream version of The Terminator. You can go back and read that last sentence again to check you didn’t just have a stroke.
Given that this movie was made on a wing, a prayer, and the hope that something even vaguely coherent would be the result, the finished product does end up being more than vaguely coherent. Despite there being zero budget for elaborate action set pieces (or, indeed, zero budget for much of anything), the team behind this throw themselves into it with a great deal of heart and, although in my view the shootouts need judicious trimming, the crunchy fight sequences often land a lot better than I’d expected.
Performance wise, Reilly seems to be going for a bit of Jimmy Cagney – not a bad choice – and there’s one particular moment of violence which is a bit of an unexpected gut punch, literally. The cast is extensive and lacking in experience but hey, if you’ve got your mates involved, why not give them roles, even if the roles are to be killed off by no-nonsense criminal types? Hirst and Wilson are the standouts, the former bringing a level of quiet menace to his role as the kingpin and the latter giving a charismatic and amusing turn as the eminently practical and often exasperated Kenny.
This isn’t the kind of fare that you’d see at your local Odeon. Those brought up on a diet of studio output are going to be utterly bewildered by Fall To The Top, and that’s even before Chuckle shows up. When he does show up, as a fixer called The Jackal, it’s a delirious cameo that has to be seen to be believed. It’s his gift to you (to me, to you, to me, to you). I am never taking that line out of this review.
Lo-fi this most certainly is and the proceedings, certainly in the second half, lean less into plot diversions and more into a procession of so many folks dying that you wonder if there’ll be anyone left to sell any drugs at all by the credits. The inevitable fate of the increasingly vicious and substance addled Mickey is offset by a darkly amusing, late in the day switch which is accompanied by one act and one line of dialogue that, regardless of your thoughts on the previous carnage, ought to at least make you think that moment is nicely played.
Fall To The Top is unpolished to the point that, if you’re not into low, low budget exploitation flicks and filmmaking on the hoof, it may not chime with your idea of cinema and that’s fine. For me, there’s always something fascinating about the alchemy of just getting a movie made and screened, doubly so if it’s done with enthusiasm and not driven by the cynicism to make a quick buck out of whatever happens to be the latest trend. This could definitely benefit from another pass at the edit, but this also has more bags of coke than the final scene of Scarface, a hilariously succinct explanation of how drug trafficking works and there’s one half of Chucklevision right there, on screen, portraying an agent of chaos. If that doesn’t have you at least slightly interested, I don’t know what to tell you.
Fall To The Top featured at this year’s Spirit of Independence Film Festival in Sheffield, UK.