Ed Skrein

News, Reviews & Features
  • Review: Alita: Battle Angel has one foot in the future, one in the past

    Movie Review | Ali Gray | 13th February 2019

    Does James Cameron's name attached to a movie mean anything anymore? With the skidmark of Terminator Genisys refusing to fade from the collective pop culture underpant, and the inevitable Avatar sequel debacle still a few merciful years away, we have a new Cameron project to mull over in the meantime. Alita: Battle Angel, a live-action sci-fi epic based on a popular Japanese anime, has been on JC's to-do list since the early 2000s but he's finally delegated it off his plate, handing over his dusty old screenplay to best pal Robert Rodriguez. I don't like the phrase 'sloppy seconds', but, well, I've said it now, it's out there, and in actual fact, in saying it I've basically answered the question I set out in the first line, so here we are, the review has begun, strap yourselves in everyone.

  • Deadpool

    Movie Review | Ali Gray | 11th February 2016

    You like to talk about tough superhero gigs. Thor was a tough gig. Mixing magic and mythology with grit and realism. Not easy. Guardians Of The Galaxy was a tough gig. Introducing an entirely new bunch of rogues unrelated to any existing properties. Tricky. Deadpool, however, is quite literally a tough gig: stepping up on stage to make with the laughs after being designated the 'funny' superhero movie. Like it's the one movie that has special dispensation to say what we all really think about superhero movies. That's a tough gig. What we ask of Deadpool is the movie equivalent of people who ask comedians to tell them a joke: a request to be funny on demand, on on our terms.

  • Kill Your Friends

    Movie Review | Ed Williamson | 6th November 2015

    I read the NME quite a lot as a younger man, when they had proper bands with normal trousers and songs with choruses, but I never knew what an 'A&R man' was. On the basis of Kill Your Friends it must stand for Amoral & R... retributive? Ha! No, come to think of it you wouldn't have that as your job title; it wouldn't make any sense, particularly on a full industrial scale. What would your job description even be? I haven't thought this through at all. Ooh look, a film.

  • The Transporter Refuelled

    Movie Review | Matt Looker | 4th September 2015

    So where the Transporter series once ran on the balding bad-assery of Jason Statham, now it has been 'refuelled' with... what, exactly? New action hero Ed Skrein - a former Game Of Thrones star extra - is hardly a nitrous gas boost worthy of such a title boast, is he? He isn't even fit to be called the Super Unleaded Stath. Surely, the 'refuelled' Transporter is only something to get excited about if the titular role was played by someone like franchise viagara Dwayne Johnson, who can provide extra lead in Frank Martin's pencil/engine. Or, wait, I've got it! Vin Diesel! Aw, c'mon. That would be perfect. What do I win?

  • Irony alert: Poster for the Transporter film that breaks its own first rule

    Movie Feature | Matt Looker | 22nd March 2015

    No Jason Statham? No deal. Oh wait, unless we abide by Rule #2 because then that doesn't matter, right? I'm so confused. Sod it, let's just follow Rule #3 too and not bother to see this.

  • iLL Manors

    Movie Review | Ed Williamson | 1st June 2012

    Being middle class, I am of course far too terrified to set foot on a council estate. No doubt I'd be set upon by a gang of toughs who would make off with my pocketbook and timepiece. And the trouble with British council estate dramas made by people like me is that they always focus on one character's dream of escape, in the belief that he deserves to transcend his environment because he is good, while everyone around him is bad. (Eddie Marsan, who is far more qualified than I am to do so, said something similar in the Metro the other week.) I've seen a million of these films. But until Plan B's iLL Manors, I hadn't seen one that had no interest in pandering to my middle-class sensibilities, and focused on documentary, not deliverance.