This tale of a motely crew of moped riding phone snatchers, featuring Stephen Odubola and Taz Skylar, is a far cry from the raw grittiness and high adrenaline it promises from the beginning, sputtering out towards the end.
★★★☆☆
George Amponsah’s Gassed Up unfolds against the backdrop of London’s frenetic streets, where moped mayhem and high-speed robberies take centre stage. After his own experience of having his phone stolen, Amponsah takes the opportunity to show the human side of the young criminals most would disregard as scum.
The stage is set with aerial shots of London, before cutting to a high-speed moped chase made up of dashcam, Go-Pro, and found footage.A gang of thieves are blazing through the city streets on their bikes, with their charismatic leader Dubz (Taz Skylar) at the helm. A criminal saga ensues, with the motley crew of young moped riders snatching phones and valuables from unaware passersby.
Among the gang is young protagonist Ash (Stephen Odubola), grappling with a fractured family: an absent father, a fleeting mother, and a dependent sister. For him, phone snatching is a bit of a laugh, a quick way to make money and a means to an end. With a £25,000 sum needed for his heroin-user mother’s rehabilitation, he’ll take whatever money he can get.
The head of their criminal operation is Shaz (Jelena Gavrilovic), Dubz’s enigmatic cousin and a femme-fatale figure draped in allure, guarded by bald heavies and speaking with a thick Albanian accent. The gang, entwined in her web, trade their stolen treasures to her, but it isn’t long before they start to get in too deep.
To be ‘gassed up’ refers to the thrill and adrenaline rush felt by gangs after they commit their crimes, a feeling of invincibility and that they will see no retribution. As the gang’s ‘gas rises’, targeting a local mechanic to rob sparks a chain reaction. Roach (Craige Middleburg), the group’s volatile loose cannon and Ash’s best friend, douses the mechanic with acid, forcing the gang to contemplate severing ties. The stakes escalate but the narrative spirals predictably into cliches of urban crime stories, reminiscent of Netflix’s shadowy London in Top Boy.
The soundtrack is a treat for fans of London rap and hip-hop. Much of the music was worked on by Kier Galvin, including the film’s signature track ‘Gassed Up’. A live performance from Ms Banks is shown in a nightclub early on, alongside a decent rap battle, and both Yung Filly and Harry Pinero make appearances.
Gassed Up captures cinematic breaths, with GoPro lenses mounted on mopeds injecting life into the frames. Clever cinematography dances with high-energy angles, painting chases against an urban canvas. Amponsah captures the perilous essence of motorbike crime with velocity and vulnerability. It may feel like it in the moment, but none of these guys are as invincible as they think.
Yet within the film’s aesthetic tapestry, writer Archie Maddocks’ narrative feels both a whirlwind and a bit far-fetched. Emotional storylines, like fleeting sketches, intrude—Ash’s inconsequential fling with Kelly (Mae Muller), his mother’s ailment kept offscreen, and his sister’s quiet narrative. Roach is also only briefly touched upon. His tendency for violence is only alluded to in passing during a short scene with his angry and overbearing father. All in all, we’re left with a few undercooked hues of storylines.
These detours deflect from the film’s essence, the crimes pulsating beneath the surface. In the final act, the gang stages a trilogy of robberies. This is a bit too excessive to the narrative, and it feels like there should have only been two. Maddocks’ script misses the intricacies and grittiness needed to really pull this off—the gang’s interactions and planning of the heists. Instead, it relies on the unseen masterminds of organised crime above to bring about an ending.
Gassed Up works best when it spends time with the members of the bike gang, and superfluous plot points leave little time for two of its members, Kobz (Mohammed Mansaray) and Mole (Tobia Jowett). The film yearns for a streamlined narrative and would have done well to focus more on the gang’s intricacies and the dynamics shaping their fate.
The film illustrates how difficult it is to get out of organised crime once you’re in it. For Ash, once things go sideways it goes from a bit of a laugh and easy cash to an inescapable life of being forced to commit crime. He is given a way out several times throughout the film, but doesn’t want to take them until it’s too late. However, without spoiling the ending of the film, it does feel underwhelming when this idea is somewhat backpedalled on before the credits roll.
The Verdict
Odubola’s performance emerges as a beacon, especially in the film’s latter cadence, where he embodies Ash’s turmoil with a prowess that transcends the script’s predictability. Yet supporting characters linger as mere shadows, paper-thin apparitions in a tale that gasps for depth. The bike chases and GoPro-fueled sparks may be turbo-charged, but Gassed Up remains a bit of sputtering engine towards the end, an aspiration for top speed that ironically runs out of gas.
Gassed Up is in UK cinemas now and will be available to stream on Prime Video from Friday 29th March.
Words by Kieran Webb
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