Joe Cornish drops large genre ideas onto small British streets and lets the kids talk first. When the film is wholly his, as Attack the Block was, it works; when the script passes through other hands, the idea survives and the wit does not always.
Fi1m perspective
The boys in Attack the Block (2011) begin as muggers, and Joe Cornish does not ask us to forgive them for it. He lets them talk, in the quick, competitive way of friends who have known one another for years, and by the time the first creature lands on the estate we have stopped counting their faults. That is the Cornish method at its best: a large genre idea dropped onto a small, specific British street, and a script that trusts the people on that street to be interesting before anything arrives from the sky. He has said of the film that "It all started with a mugging", and it shows.
He came from television comedy, as half of Adam and Joe with Adam Buxton on The Adam and Joe Show from 1996 to 2001, and moved into screenwriting in the 2000s alongside Edgar Wright. Together, with Steven Moffat, they wrote Steven Spielberg's The Adventures of Tintin (2011), and they wrote an early version of Ant-Man. Attack the Block, produced by Nira Park, was his first film as director. Eight years passed before the second, The Kid Who Would Be King (2019), an Arthurian fantasy for children, and four more before he created and directed the supernatural series Lockwood & Co. (2023).
In the debut everything pulls one way. Jonathan Amos cuts the chases so we always know where the boys are, Steven Price's score drives without doing all the work, and John Boyega gives the gang a leader with weight. At 88 minutes it has almost no fat. The fault is one that recurs: having earned our sympathy, Cornish explains it, and the social lesson arrives underlined when the actors had already made the point. We cared about these boys more than we expected to, and the feeling came from listening to them, not from anything the script later said on their behalf.
Ant-Man (2015), for which Cornish and Wright wrote the story and share screenplay credit with Paul Rudd and Adam McKay, shows what happens when the idea survives and the hand does not. Wright left before shooting. Peyton Reed's film is small on purpose, likeable and funny in patches, and it explains itself more often than it needs to, a habit we suspect is partly Cornish's own. Most reviews mourned the film that might have been; the one that exists is pleasant and gone by morning. The consensus on The Kid Who Would Be King, which we have not reviewed, is that it is more conventional than the debut.
Cornish draws on the Spielberg films of the 1980s, children meeting the impossible on their own doorstep, and marries that to British realism; he pitched Attack the Block as Aliens crossed with La Haine. The mixture has produced one film we recommend without much hesitation and a good deal of waiting, since the gaps are long and some projects have not been made. A sequel to Attack the Block has been in development. If it arrives, we hope he lets the boys talk and leaves the moral in the cutting room.
Biography
Joe Cornish is an English comedian, screenwriter and director. With Adam Buxton he formed the comedy duo Adam and Joe, known for their Channel 4 series The Adam and Joe Show in the late 1990s.
Cornish made his feature directorial debut with Attack the Block (2011), which he also wrote. The film, set on a south London housing estate, starred John Boyega and was executive produced by Edgar Wright. He later directed and wrote The Kid Who Would Be King (2019) and created, wrote and directed episodes of the Netflix series Lockwood & Co. (2023).
He co-wrote the screenplays for The Adventures of Tintin (2011) with Steven Moffat and Edgar Wright, and Ant-Man (2015) with Wright, Adam McKay and Paul Rudd. Cornish trained at Bournemouth Film School after attending Westminster School in London.
