Attack the Block

The movie’s amateurishly made. But the script is full of little surprises. The writer and director, Joe Cornish, is going for something that’s hard to do: a social satire of movie genres. The social part is not so much about real society. It’s about the way society works in movies, the way thugs, stoners, damsels, and creatures function in them. It’s possible to enjoy “Attack the Block’’ purely as an action comedy - the tagline is “inner city vs. outer space,’’ like “Cowboys & Aliens’’ or Slip ’n Slide. But Cornish wants to tweak the way stock characters work by dismantling them then reconsidering their function.

In another film, Moses and his multiracial crew would be marginal kids who commit a purse snatching, auto theft, or murder that triggers or advances the plot. Cornish foregrounds them. The movie begins with them mugging a young white nurse (Jodie Whittaker). An explosion interrupts the assault, and the boys go to check it out only to discover a reptilian creature inside a car. The nurse escapes. The creature scratches Moses’s face. And soon a race of pitch-black primates with glow-in-the-dark teeth descends upon the apartment complex for reasons of comical biological reproduction that might mean to be another joke on sex and race. It’s hard to say, but, visually, the ape-wolf-splotches are the second-best thing in the movie. They’re apes by way of Nintendo and the music videos of Gorillaz, and they hold their close-ups.