If Adam Deacon’s Anuvahood was the Carry On of Brit urban comedy, then perhaps The Weekend is the On the Buses: likable, freewheeling, a bit ropey. Jovian Wade, Dee Kartier and Percelle Ascott have already shown tag-team charisma on their Mandem on the Wall YouTube channel and E4’s Youngers, and they easily carry it over to their feature debut as a trio of London friends who accidentally lay their hands on £100,000 of gangster readies and foolishly decide to spend it. As well as scampishly running rings around the grim fatalism of Noel Clarke’s ’hood trilogy, The Weekend atypically makes Wade’s lead a nice middle-class boy. Directed by fellow debutant Sheridan De Myers, the caper takes too long to get going and is thinly sustained when it does – however much Dizzee and Stormzy is slathered on to the soundtrack. But the film fizzes in episodic bursts with a feel for London’s multicultural pageant; everyone loves a dodgy Nigerian pastor.
