City Rats

With about as much reliable insight into the human condition as a stack of old ‘Dear Deirdre…’ columns, ‘City Rats’ haphazardly tails a pack of tenuously linked London down-and-outs as they soul-search, emote and swear their way across the capital. It’s a terrible film, so blithely wrong-headed in its execution that some scenes are quite  entertaining in an ‘is this really happening?’ kind of way. Take, for instance, the bit where shame-faced gay party boy Olly (Kenny Doughty) is looking after his autistic, deaf, dumb and latently homosexual brother Chris (James Lance) for the evening. Leading him through Soho, Olly picks up a rent boy and then – for reasons unknown – demands that he sit in as his deaf, dumb and latently homosexual brother is stripped of his virginity. The performances are mostly of the frenzied, soap-opera sort, save for Susan Lynch, who is likeable as a sass-talking ‘crippled whore’.