| Hyena | |
|---|---|
 United Kingdom theatrical release poster | |
| Directed by | Gerard Johnson |
| Produced by |
|
| Written by | Gerard Johnson |
| Starring | |
| Music by | The The |
| Cinematography | Benjamin Kračun |
| Edited by | Ian Davies |
Production companies | |
Release date |
|
Running time | 112 minutes |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
Hyena is a 2014 British film described as a "police corruption thriller". [1] [2] written and directed by Gerard Johnson.
Michael Logan is a detective sergeant in London, working as part of a specialised taskforce alongside his friends and colleagues Chris, Martin and Keith. The taskforce’s unconventional and corrupt operations bring the officers into contact with European drug syndicates, with them happy to turn a blind eye to their dealings for either a cut, or electing to confiscate suppliers' merchandise for their own profit. Logan meets with a contact in a Turkish drug cartel, who is organising a large scale shipment that he has invested £100,000 into with the hope of netting an even better profit. However during the meeting his contact is ambushed and attacked by members of a rival Albanian gang, run by the Kabashi brothers, looking to expand their power. Logan meets with and aims to provide the Albanians with the same service he provided the Turks, but they aren't easily led.
London is the capital and largest city of both England and the United Kingdom. Standing on the River Thames in the south-east of England, at the head of its 50-mile (80 km) estuary leading to the North Sea, London has been a major settlement for two millennia. Londinium was founded by the Romans. The City of London, London's ancient core − an area of just 1.12 square miles (2.9 km2) and colloquially known as the Square Mile − retains boundaries that follow closely its medieval limits. The City of Westminster is also an Inner London borough holding city status. Greater London is governed by the Mayor of London and the London Assembly.
A drug cartel is any criminal organization with the intention of supplying drug trafficking operations. They range from loosely managed agreements among various drug traffickers to formalized commercial enterprises. The term was applied when the largest trafficking organizations reached an agreement to coordinate the production and distribution of cocaine. Since that agreement was broken up, drug cartels are no longer actually cartels, but the term stuck and it is now popularly used to refer to any criminal narcotics related organization.
Turkey, officially the Republic of Turkey, is a transcontinental country located mainly in Western Asia, with a smaller portion on the Balkan Peninsula in Southeast Europe. East Thrace, located in Europe, is separated from Anatolia by the Sea of Marmara, the Bosphorous strait and the Dardanelles. Turkey is bordered by Greece and Bulgaria to its northwest; Georgia to its northeast; Armenia, the Azerbaijani exclave of Nakhchivan and Iran to the east; and Iraq and Syria to the south. Istanbul is the largest city, but more central Ankara is the capital. Approximately 70 to 80 per cent of the country's citizens identify as Turkish. Kurds are the largest minority; the size of the Kurdish population is a subject of dispute with estimates placing the figure at anywhere from 12 to 25 per cent of the population.
Meanwhile, he and his colleagues are being investigated by the Professional Standards Department, headed up by Detective Inspector Nick Taylor. Complicating matters further, Logan is seconded from the Taskforce to a new operation run by the vice unit, aiming at investigating the Kabashi’s involvement in people trafficking. It is headed up by DI David Knight, a former friend and colleague of Logans who he fell out with a decade prior.
The internal affairs refers to a division of a law enforcement agency that investigates incidents and possible suspicions of law-breaking and professional misconduct attributed to officers on the force. It is thus a mechanism of limited self-governance, "a police force policing itself". In different systems, internal affairs can go by other names such as Internal Investigations Division, professional standards, inspectorate general, Office of Professional Responsibility, Internal Review Board, or similar.
Peter Ferdinando is a British character actor, known for his varied performances.
Anthony Pitts is an English actor, most notable for playing Archie Brooks in the long-running British soap Emmerdale Farm between 1983 and 1993.
Neil Maskell is an English actor, writer, and director who is known for his appearances in British crime and horror films such as The Football Factory and Kill List.
Hyena was the opening film at the 2014 Edinburgh Film Festival and later in 2014 was shown at the Toronto International Film Festival.
The Toronto International Film Festival is one of the largest publicly attended film festivals in the world, attracting over 480,000 people annually. Since its founding in 1976, TIFF has grown to become a permanent destination for film culture operating out of the TIFF Bell Lightbox, located in downtown Toronto.
Tribeca acquired North American rights to the film. [3] It ran on 24 April 2015 as part of the Tribeca Film Festival. [4]
Tribeca, originally written as TriBeCa, is a neighborhood in Lower Manhattan, New York City. Its name is a syllabic abbreviation from "Triangle Below Canal Street". The "triangle", or more accurately, a trapezoid, is bounded by Canal Street, West Street, Broadway, and Chambers Street. More recently, a common marketing tactic has been to extend Tribeca's southern boundary to either Vesey or Murray Streets to increase the appeal of property listings.
The Tribeca Film Festival (TFF) is a prominent film festival held in the Tribeca neighborhood of Manhattan, showcasing a diverse selection of independent films. Since its inaugural year in 2002, it has become a recognized outlet for independent filmmakers in all genres to release their work to a broad audience.
Hyena received critical acclaim and currently holds 78% on Rotten Tomatoes. [5]
The soundtrack to Hyena was composed and recorded by Matt Johnson under the moniker The The, his British post-punk genre-busting band known more recently for a series of parallel soundtrack works. Matt is the brother of writer and director Gerard Johnson, and has provided soundtrack input to many of his brother's earlier works including short film Mug and the feature-length Tony.
The soundtrack is a genre-crossing piece rooted in early electronica and ambient genres with a central European influence to reflect the origins of the main villain protaganists, and was well received by fans.
Hyena won the main Jury prize at Beaune Film Festival 2015, Best Film At 2014's Sitges Film Festival's Fantàstic Òrbita section and at Les Arcs European Cinema Festival, Peter Ferdinando won the Métronews Best Actor award for his performance in Hyena. [6] [7]
Matthew Ryan Phillippe is an American actor. After appearing as Billy Douglas on the soap opera One Life to Live, he came to fame in the late 1990s with starring roles in a string of films, including I Know What You Did Last Summer, Cruel Intentions, and 54. In the 2000s, he appeared in several films, including Gosford Park (2001), Crash (2004), Flags of Our Fathers (2006), Breach (2007), Stop-Loss (2008), MacGruber (2010), and The Lincoln Lawyer (2011). In 2010, Phillippe starred as Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer Greg Marinovich in The Bang-Bang Club. He starred in the lead role of Bob Lee Swagger in the USA Network thriller drama Shooter.
Crime films, in the broadest sense, are a cinematic genre inspired by and analogous to the crime fiction literary genre. Films of this genre generally involve various aspects of crime and its detection. Stylistically, the genre may overlap and combine with many other genres, such as drama or gangster film, but also include comedy, and, in turn, is divided into many sub-genres, such as mystery, suspense or noir.
Heroic bloodshed is a genre of Hong Kong action cinema and crime film revolving around stylized action sequences and dramatic themes such as brotherhood, duty, honour, redemption and violence. The term heroic bloodshed was coined by editor Rick Baker in the magazine Eastern Heroes in the late 1980s, specifically referring to the styles of directors John Woo and Ringo Lam. Baker defined the genre as "a Hong Kong action film that features a lot of gun play and gangsters rather than kung fu. Lots of blood. Lots of action." Woo's breakthrough film A Better Tomorrow (1986) largely set the template for the genre. Woo has also been a major influence in its continued popularity and evolution in his following works, namely A Better Tomorrow 2 (1987), The Killer (1989) and Hard Boiled (1992).
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Starred Up is a 2013 British prison crime drama film directed by David Mackenzie and written by Jonathan Asser. Starring Jack O'Connell, Ben Mendelsohn and Rupert Friend, the film is based on Jonathan Asser's experiences working as a voluntary therapist at HM Prison Wandsworth, with some of the country’s most violent criminals. The title is a term used to describe the early transfer of a criminal from a Young Offender Institution to an adult prison.
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