Have you ever wondered what sort of superpower you would most like to have? Invisibility? Super strength? Ability to travel in time? Telekinesis? You probably have at some point. But have you ever wondered if having any, or several, of those powers would actually be a good thing? Or if you would use your powers for good or bad?
You've probably done that too. Netflix's Supacell (created, written, and directed - I think that's what they call a showrunner - by Rapman, with additional directorial duties c/o Sebastian Thiel) is a rather brilliant afrofuturist thriller that sees five ordinary black south Londoners discovering they, whether or not they like it, have superpowers.
Michael (Tosin Cole) is a delivery driver who works for CPX (can't help thinking that's a dig at the notoriously hopeless DPD) and is very much in love with his girlfriend Dionne (Adelayo Adedayo) and plans to ask her to marry him, Andre (Eric Kofi-Abrefa) is an ex-con struggling with money and hoping to find work so he can look after his teenage son AJ (Ky-Mani Carty) better than he has in the past, and Rodney (Calvin Demba) is a small time drug dealer.
Sabrina (Nadine Mills) is a conscientious NHS nurse who lives with her party loving sister Sharleen (Rayxia Ojo) and Tazer (Josh Tedeku) is a leader of a violent gang called the Tower Boys. He's not one for smiling but he is one for zombie knives. He lives with his gran and refuses to call his mother his mother because she walked out on him when he was younger.
These five chief protagonists find their lives becoming ever more entwined starting when Tazer stabs Michael in a failed attempt to mug him. As Michael lies there bleeding, possibly dying, his eyes begin to sparkle and this, clearly, is when he discovers his superpowers. One of which happens to be time travel and when Michael makes his first visit to the future he meets a very familiar face and discovers some very bad news.
Can he use his powers to alter the future. To do so he will need to work with the others but, at first - stabbing aside, they don't actually know each other. While Michael can time travel and teleport, Rodney can move at ridiculous speeds (in fact not just move but he can even eat a fry up in a greasy spoon cafe in a split second), Tazer can turn himself invisible, Sabrina has the power of telekinesis, and Andre has Incredible Hulk like strength.
Some of them are happier with their powers than others and some have more control over their powers than others. But it soon becomes apparent they will need to learn to harness these powers and to work together because there are people out there who know who they are and want to stop them. Why that is we don't find out until very near the end but it's apparent from the start they will go to great lengths to bring them in.
Soon their families and friends will be affected. Dionne, Sharleen, Rodney's best mate Spud (Giacomo Mancini), Andre's mate John (Travis Jay), Michael's friend Gabriel (Michael Salami), and even Michael's mum Tina (Pamela Jikiemi) who suffers from sickle cell. There are violent scenes, there are chilling scenes, and there are surprisingly moving and tender scenes. Not least the ones between Michael and Dionne and Andre and AJ. Both of which held personal relevance for me during this stage of my life.
The love, and respect, between Michael and Dione is so heartwarming that when the fates start to conspire against them you find yourself willing things to work out for them. It's a tautly plotted, well acted drama that gets more and more gripping with each episode and because it's anything but formulaic it's really hard to second guess where the action is going next. Put bluntly, it's a good binge watch.
The afrobeats, grime, and hip-hop soundtrack is just right and the overhead shots of London are beautiful but it's even better when the camera comes down to a ground level to show a very realistic, very recognisable south London of Lebara shop fronts, Nandos, Bargain Booze, 185 buses, and BMXs. Being filmed in my 'hood (Peckham, Lewisham, Camberwell, Deptford, Thamesmead (ok, that's not that near me), and, er Edinburgh) there were lots of very familiar sights which grounded this supernatural thriller in my day to day reality.
Brixton tube station, Burgess Park, Peckham Rye station, the Salvation Army building on Denmark Hill, Lewisham DLR station, Warwick Gardens, and The Prince of Peckham pub all featured and, for me, they were as much the stars of the show as Michael, Sabrina, Andre, Rodney, and Tazer. With excellent supporting performances from Ghetts as violent gangster Krazy and Andy Thompson as Tazer's sidekick Twosie as well as cameos from Eddie Marsan, Sian Brooke, and Robbie Gee, I found Supacell to be a show that once I got into I was hooked.
As five lives, and more, become ever more interconnected the action ramps up but so does the plot. A missing girl may hold the secret to the superpowers and to the bizarre hooded figures that sometimes appear out of nowhere to hunt them down. But the secret may also be hidden in a drug den that looked to me an awful lot like the old Aylesbury Estate near Elephant and Castle. And why shouldn't superheroes live in and around the Elephant and Castle? I'll look out for them next time I hop on the 63.
No comments:
Post a Comment