The driving force behind hoodie melodramas Kidulthood and Adulthood, girl-power caper flick 4.3.2.1. and sports drama Fast Girls, Noel Clarke now turns his hand to the sci-fi thriller genre as co-writer, producer and star of Storage 24.
A military cargo plane has crashed over London, disgorging its top-secret contents over the city. Oblivious to the chaos, dejected Charlie (Clarke) and ex-girlfriend Shelley (Antonia Campbell-Hughes), accompanied by their respective best friends, run into each other at the storage facility that is housing their possessions following their break-up. Social awkwardness is the last of their problems, though, when the emergency sends the unit into lockdown, trapping the group inside with an unseen predator.
After a feebly scripted and acted beginning, Storage 24 gets into its stride when this mysterious assailant begins stalking its prey through the facility’s maze-like corridors, allowing director Johannes Roberts to rip off chunks of a string of genre classics from Alien to Die Hard as it goes. Amid the scares, Clarke impresses when he’s wriggling through air ducts or squaring up to the film’s monstrous threat, but any scene requiring dramatic heft finds him wanting.
On general release from Friday 29th June.
