Apparently, the pleasure's all mine.

Rating: 9/10 (2 December 2007)

This excellent action movie reminds us that the word "desperate" is derived from "despair." Each moment is a last chance. Every choice is a final option.
It's a quiet, clear-cut story told very loud, fleshed with nuance and with relentless violence. The relationships are desperately intense - the love is real; the hate is palpable; the ambivalence is overwhelming. The fairy tale of Theo's redemption from faithlessness is the more welcome because it is somehow credible. The weave of fantasy and cultural references lays like an organic fabric, though painted as bright and pale as dawn in Dover.
The scenes of action are more satisfying than in your garden variety shoot-em-up, because these all have consequences. They are each of them important to the story, each a do-or-die, each executed with conviction and competence. Best use of a car battery in a fight; best motorcycle wreck since ROAD WARRIOR. The visual imagination is pretty hot: David with a steel tibia, an album cover out the window, the blasted countryside of charnel pits a disturbingly welcome relief from the screaming blight of the urban streets.
But it's the heart that really thrills me. If you don't cry during the cease-fire, when that baby goes down the steps, go see SCHINDLER'S LIST. That's probably more your speed. CHILDREN OF MEN is about the only apocalyptic refugee movie I can stand, because there's more than the standard family-behind-a-fence; I can smell the cages, I can feel the cold coming up from the pavement, and I am in their predicament. I care about these people because I'm involved in the action as I never was in Spielberg's Poland, where I was at best a tourist. Here I am an inmate.
The London in this picture is probably twice or three times as scabrous as any big city in the West today, but no more awful than, say, Baghdad or Freetown any Tuesday. The modern age is all about perspective, isn't it?