Horses should be held on that one, of course: you don’t expect it to smash any box-office records. But it marks a point in his career: he’s the star, and essentially the only reason anyone, other than big fans of director Pete Travis’ Dredd, is going to see it. It all hangs on him. This past is one of City’s more successful elements. Tommy and his friend Lovely, and old flame Shelley, grew up around here drinking cider on the swings and playing football with Coke cans, and the flashback scenes feature excellent acting from the mainly inexperienced young cast, with a particularly eerie dead ringer for a younger Riz in Reiss Kershi-Hussain. There’s a trauma they all share, and how it’s teased out gradually in line with the A-story is a credit to them and to Travis’ steady hand. While Ahmed is an effective guide through west London’s seamier corners (happily, no establishing shots of Big Ben or tourist spots: this is Acton, baby) and the story just about rich enough, you can’t shake the feeling that without him you wouldn’t be watching much. There are problems with the script, like a voiceover that you think is going to be a feature, which then disappears for an hour. The dialogue clangs quite frequently, not helped by the occasional bit of Grange Hill-style delivery from the wider cast that we really should’ve excised from British film by now. And the attempt at genre homage is a bit too self-conscious: does Tommy need to smoke so heavily, enjoy Scotch and wise-crack in the face of danger? In a sense these are flags Travis raises to show you what he’s doing, but we get it already. Some of it comes off as parody and arrests your concentration, like the old ‘I knew this dame was trouble the minute she walked into my office’ riff we get at the beginning. It’s certainly not a dud: Ahmed carries it just as far as you need him to, and it’s stylishly shot and surprisingly funny. If he’s going to be a big star, which looks like his likely trajectory, and he wants to carry on popping up in and supporting independent British films, then good for him: not everyone does. But he’ll have more options now, and there may be slightly better ones than this. City Of Tiny Lights is in UK cinemas now.
