An Irish buddy movie that has already set domestic box-office records, this tale of a pair of gloriously feckless 15-year-old aspiring drug dealers has a homegrown charm that is hard to resist. Conor (Alex Murphy) and Jock (Chris Walley) have something of the clueless, deadbeat appeal of Lenny Abrahamson’s junkie chancers Adam & Paul, but although the story doesn’t flinch from the darker elements – chipper habitual bike thief Jock is covered in bruises from the abuse meted out by his alcoholic father – there’s an innocence here that is absent from the bleak black comedy of Abrahamson’s picture.
The story is inspired by a real-life event: the seizure of a record amount of cocaine in a drugs bust off the coast of Cork. In this spin on the story, our opportunistic but hapless heroes set off across country on stolen bikes to help themselves to one of the bales of drugs that they imagine are littering the shore.
The humour here is spot on – it’s the most perceptive comic portrait of the adolescent male since The Inbetweeners, but with a naturalism that is unexpectedly disarming. A scene in which Conor tries to cadge a compliment out of his brutally unsentimental mam (Hilary Rose, excellent) is glorious. A sequel is both inevitable and welcome.
