Wall of Silence is a brilliant, real life recreation of the brutal, caveman-style night-time gang killing of a youth near a notorious council estate in south-east London and the story of the brilliant detective work in the search for the vile perpetrators.
This is the same evil, disgusting inner/south London territory that you see in the work of someone like Gary Oldman. It's not the mawkish, cotton wool London of Richard Curtis - that's all on the other side of town, the glitzy, tourist-lands of west London, with lots of geeky Americans and lots of nice, trendy little boutiques and bookshops. Notting Hill and Portobello Road whimsy.
Christopher Menaul London is gritty, visceral and life-and-death struggle. This is the aptly and forebodingly-named Shooters Hill, sandwiched between the equally infamous districts of Bermondsey, Deptford, Rotherhithe and New Cross - don't go there late at night. This milieu is the Sweeney (1977) but twenty years later and gone insane, with a new generation of ever younger thugs without the old 'respect'.
You see all of the miscellany of urban, night-time life - semi-derelict council estates littered with filthy trash cans, wire grills and barbed wire and seedy late-night kebab shops and takeaways, battered cars and the general poverty and hopelessness of residents entrapped in vast estates, watched over by their delinquent, hoodlum young neighbours. Do you say anything if you see anything?
The only thing missing is the now ubiquitous security cameras (Britain has the most in the world according to today's newspapers); in this instance they would have been invaluable.
Add to this the sheer mayhem of a night out on the town anywhere in the United Kingdom at the weekend and you have the ingredients for disaster that is probably only narrowly averted many times all over the country.
The police search for the gang of evil delinquent youths is led by the brilliant Tony Cottis (played by the excellent but sadly under-used actor Philip Davis).
Philip Davis is really excellent as the conscientious, kind and decent Inspector Tony Cottis, who goes after the thugs relentlessly, turning the film into a classic British TV detection series, along the lines of the equally brilliant Danielle Cable: Eyewitness (2003) and This is Personal: the Hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper (1999). Early on, Cottis faces immense intimidation from both the youth thugs and older people connected with them, yet he carries on nonetheless, to his great credit. Davis is one of those relatively undiscovered London actors probably about a couple of rungs down the fame ladder from his real peers, Ray Winstone and Gary Oldman.
Most of the acting is superb, although James Nesbitt is a bit unconvincing on account of speaking in his native Ulster accent (as the father of the murdered Jamie Robe). Actually, they should have got Gary Oldman for the part. The actress who plays Tracey the witness was brilliant. The Turkish witnesses are played well and are a credit to their country.
