What makes it different from others?

A Masterpiece!

Very interesting film. Was caught on the premise when seeing the trailer but unsure as to what the outcome would be for the showing. As it turns out, it was a very good film.

A lot of perfectly good film show their cards early, establish a unique premise and let the audience explore a topic at a leisurely pace, without much in terms of surprise. this film is not one of those films.

An utterly captivating drama, perfectly executed over four episodes with not a single flaw to be found.Top-notch writing, precision directing, exemplary performances from the entire cast, seamless editing, with music and cinematography that intelligently don't make themselves noticed (so nothing showy or artsy, just excellent scene-setting) perfectly paced with an overall sense of all-round good storytelling.Every moment of this true-life drama was suffused with authenticity, integrity, and verisimilitude, with no audience manipulation to be detected (which doesn't mean it wasn't there; just that it was artfully and subtly done). This is a rare gem that is worth watching more than once, although the subject matter is grim. Top marks.

There are two sides to every story and this production does not present them. In fact there are three main plot strands-- one involving the victim's family, one involving the lead investigator, and one where the perpetrators and their crowd are lumped together. But all these plots are set up to make the viewer feel sorry for the victim's family. I guess that's understandable given the nature of the main crime but it does not really give us an unvarnished look at society like it should, or why this situation happened in the first place.I would have preferred to see the story a bit from the point of view of the boys that where charged, as well as their families. All the lower class characters in this tale are presented as untrustworthy and unreliable, out to cover things up. There is no sympathetic rendering of the struggles they face; not even the mothers are presented in any kind of sympathetic light. One of the mothers ultimately does the right thing and tells the truth in court, but then a lawyer quickly tries to discredit her statements as false because she's supposedly a known liar.As for the detective assigned to the case, we are told at the end he became friends with the victim's family. So obviously all scenes in which he appears are going to be slanted to make him more heroic and to make his female superior look like a villain.The production itself is too long. Four full hours is way too much to devote to this story. Each of the four one-hour installments I watched had at least 15 minutes that could have been cut. Meaning this could have been told in a much more compact three hours if the narrative had been tightened. In the first installment we get shots of the victim's mother carefully ironing and putting clothes in her son's bedroom drawers. We also see her and her husband discussing what color to paint a living room wall. As well as lingering shots of soccer balls in the backyard. Tedious and a waste of screen time that had nothing to do with the key issues of the story. In the second and third installments there are countless scenes of the police reviewing the video footage of the killing with nothing new being figured out or added to the story. A montage or lap dissolve compressing these non-events would have been sufficient. The third installment has lingering shots of the police on their computers-- at one point the director and editor cut to a shot of a keyboard as a police officer debates typing something. Why? There's no real reason for all the wasted screen time. The filmmakers do not seem to know how to tell the story more expediently. It's like their primary goal is to just fill up screen time.There are also a lot of long tracking shots, meant to convey realism. Some of these work rather well. Especially in the first part where the victim is killed and we have a nearly two-minute shot of Rhys' mother leaving the house and going to the car park. But after a while these long tracking shots are an artistic nuisance. In some cases you can tell the actors have to wait to deliver their dialogue because they're walking ahead of the camera crew waiting for the microphones to catch up to them so their dialogue can be audibly recorded. As a result we get a very stilted and very labored presentation of a story that is entertaining only in how transparent its biases are and how transparently artistic the people behind the camera are trying to put this over on the viewers.

STAR RATING: ***** Saturday Night **** Friday Night *** Friday Morning ** Sunday Night * Monday Morning In August 2007, in the car park of The Fir Tree pub in Croxteth, Liverpool, eleven year old Rhys Jones, who was on his way home from football practice, became the most innocent of casualties in a local gang rivalry, dying after being accidentally shot by a bullet meant for someone else. On the eve of promotion, Detective Superintendent Dave Kelly (Stephen Graham) is assigned to lead the investigation into Rhys's death that comes to have a far more profound effect on his professional and home life than he could have imagined. Despite his dogged determination to get justice for Rhys and his parents Mel (Sinead Keenan) and Steve (Brian F.O' Byrne), Kelly encounters a wall of silence from a local community living in fear of the gangs and the repercussions of being labelled a 'grass.' Ten years on from the case that this TV drama is based on, ITV have chosen to make it into a three part drama detailing the case and how events panned out. There's certainly a lot of meat on the bones to work with, and the film is careful not to sensationalise anything, and tell the case in a sensitive and effecting way. Aside from the already horrifying death of a child, the case grabbed the nations attention also by highlighting what may well be a commonplace truth around the country, of normal, decent, respectable people living alongside those who live by their own rules with no intention of living honestly, and the shocking consequences of what happens when these two worlds sometimes inevitably collide.Although he feels a little too much like the 'go to' guy for this part, it can also be said that there was no better person for the lead role than Graham, with his natural Scouse background and pretty realistic physical resemblance to the real Dave Kelly. He fits the part pretty effortlessly, but still turns in a reliably great performance, as an increasingly seasoned detective who feels personally affronted by the crime he is investigating, unable to let it go due to the sheer outrageousness and senselessness of it, young men whose need to belong and be part of armies who are willing to endanger and take life for something as stupid as an area code. He is complimented by Keenan and O'Byrne as Rhy's grieving parents, O'Byrne bringing a quiet, bottled up angst as the father, with Keenan an emotional torrent as the mother.During the film, Mel takes exception to Rhys being described as being 'in the wrong place at the wrong time.' It's a commonly thrown around soundbite, that is rather unintentionally thoughtless in its use. A very lawful world and a very uncivilised world do coexist by each other very unknowingly, and that world can sometimes reach up and bite with the most tragic of results. But it should always be that world that never has any place or any time, rather than the decent one. ****

I remember when Rhys was shot, the incident this drama is about, and it was an awful event and anybody who was aware of the case at the time will have no surprises with this drama. There was plenty of controversy over the whole event from poor Rhys' death, his family's strength, the age of the killers and the frustrating and seemingly all encompassing hurdle of getting witnesses to "grass".All of the above is covered sensitively and, with the Jones' giving their input to this drama, a fair degree of accuracy too. You obviously feel for the victim and his family but this drama also shines a light on peer pressure, the difficulty of getting someone to agree to be a witness due to the stigma and dangers of being a " grass" and the shameful enabling and apathetic attitude of some of the suspects' parents.Whether someone is aware of the case or not this is an interesting, gripping and emotive drama. You can't watch this and leave it not feeling anything. Utterly heartbreaking. RIP Rhys Jones.