, the Australian-American director — usually credited simply as “Nabil” — who has made videos for Kanye West, Dua Lipa, Kendrick Lamar, Bruno Mars, Nicki Minaj, Frank Ocean, the Black Eyed Peas, John Legend, Diddy, Shrillex, and Antony and the Johnsons. You can glimpse his talent in “Gully” — not because it’s a film of showoff imagery , but because the movie looks, for a while, like it’s trying to be “Boyz n the Hood” meets “A Clockwork Orange,” and you get curious to follow that down.
The movie is set in South Central L.A. and features a trio of very good young actors. Kelvin Harrison Jr., the star of “Waves,” is Jesse, a kid so troubled he literally doesn’t speak , and when you see the relationship he has with his white stepfather, played by John Corbett in a creepy beard, you understand the silence.
The three, who grew up together, drift around — from a DVD store they trash for no good reason to the home of a wealthy couple they terrorize, from a couple of drug dealers they beat up with an ultraviolent gusto right out of their favorite video games to a nightclub where they party with two young women from out of town. None of the encounters comes to much, and that’s kind of the point. The drift is life; they’re leading a go-nowhere existence.
A movie, however, needs to go somewhere, and “Gully” basically doesn’t. The reason I cite the splash-making qualities of music-video directors is that while Nabil doesn’t overdose on visual trickery, there’s an underlying pretension to “Gully.” He stages certain scenes in a way that’s quietly compelling, especially when he digresses over to the character of Greg , a former gang member who just finished serving a prison sentence for nearly bashing someone to death.
The trouble with “Gully” is that instead of exploring its three main characters, the film subsumes them into Nabil Elderkin’s overly benumbed “vision.” A movie about oppressed and impoverished lives has the right to be tragic, but psychologically “Gully” is static — no one in it grows or evolves. It’s a movie that presents growing up in the hood as a booby trap of fate, but the film doesn’t earn its doomsaying.
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