Four burly coppers suit up and storm a nightclub. Inside they pulverise everyone in flickering slow motion. With club music booming over the scene, it’s a dispiriting mix of music video and Guy Ritchie knock-off. To be fair, Hyena does try to do things a little differently as it strides with grubby aggression through the well-trodden paths of multi-cultural urban crime. It still ends up a mess.
Corrupt cops and organised crime in London hardly conjures much excitement. It brings dismal reminders of a decade of cheap and nasty gangster drudge. At its heart, Gerard Johnson’s film is just that, but he introduces enough touches to elevate it slightly. Some work with searing realism, others are just plain weird.
The four burly coppers, these fine specimens of Her Majesty’s Constabulary, live a cushy life of backhanders from the local Turkish gang they collude with. But Michael (Peter Ferdinando), team leader and the only one who seems to have more than one brain cell to rub together, has bigger plans. He wants to go into business with the Turks to make a fortune from a proposed drugs pipeline.
Two things intervene to create some semblance of narrative. The first is a vicious Albanian gang who muscle in on the Turks, the second a police taskforce Michael is arbitrarily assigned too, led by an old enemy. With those ubiquitous villains of bureaucracy, the besuited internal investigators breathing down his neck, and a somewhat less willing criminal enterprise undermining his plans, he’s left in a perilous position.
It’s a thin plot that fails to stretch across the running time. Many scenes consist of little beyond watching Michael’s brow furrow as problems mount up. None of this is helped by the weird slow motion neon scenes that crop up regularly. The decision to place the Albanians base of operations in a strip club seems to exist mostly to film a series of awful nightclub promos. It’s the kind of thing you might see on posters for a scummy backwater club.
You can hardly blame Ferdinando for his uncontrollable brow furrowing either. He puts in a decent performance melding intimidating physical presence into confusion brought by his collapsing world. But he’s given little support. His trio of mindless acolytes (Neil Maskell, Tony Pitts and Gordon Brown) goof around amiably without troubling the dramatic scenes. Stephen Graham and Richard Dormer are solid as his internal enemies, MyAnna Buring much less so as his girlfriend.
There are a few good moments. The scenes with Elisa Lasowski’s abused sex worker stand out for their unpleasantly honest realism. One sex/rape encounter is all the more effective for its lack of adornment. But these brief interludes are swamped by repetitive scenes and some truly bizarre behaviour. The drugged up use of condiments near the end is particularly odd.
The disappointing finale sums up the whole film. On route to a standard b-movie showdown, it pulls back aiming for something higher. Unable to reach for more because there’s nothing to be found, it also fails to satisfy its own pulpy nature. It might have been better off playing straight to the DVD market.
Director: Gerard Johnson
Writer: Gerard Johnson
Stars: Peter Ferdinando, Stephen Graham, Neil Maskell
Runtime: 112 min
Country: UK
Film Rating: 
