A modern take on the Sweeney Todd story, K-Shop has some
good ideas but these get buried in a script that fails to make the main character convincing.
Salah (Ziad Abaza) is a Turkish-British student, about to
graduate with a politics degree. With nothing left to do but fine tune his
dissertation, he comes to help his ailing father Zaki (Nayef Rashed) who runs a
late-night kebab place in an English seaside town. He is horrified at the way
the drunks abuse Zaki, abuse that turns tragic when Zaki dies at the hands of
one of them, leaving Salah in charge of the shop. From there, he launches a
one-man vigilante operation against his customers, and, being a businessman,
finds a way to dispose of the evidence and cut down on his overheads.
The film certainly paints a bleak view of England, a land of
binge drinking, vomiting, fancy dress stag nights, and sinister nightclub
owning reality TV stars. The biggest influence, consciously or not, seems to be
the Death Wish series and their subsequent rip-offs, where the filmmakers are
not subtle about telling us about whom we should be cheering for and who we
should be booing. The characterisation for the latter doesn't really go beyond
being us being shown somebody saying something awful, such as call centre
workers boasting about ripping off elderly vulnerable customers, or a drunk man
helping himself to food and referring to Zaki as Saddam, and the character arc
of Salah going from bookish student to cold blooded killer is not believable in
the slightest.
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