The Inevitable Defeat of Mister and Pete ★★★
MISTER (Skylan Brooks) is a young kid with a popped-up peak cap providing a brim of street-smart attitude to his youthful face. He’s living the hard-knock life on the rougher edges of Brooklyn during a sweltering summer of discontent. His mother, Gloria (Jennifer Hudson), is a distant satellite of inner-city anguish — a heroinaddicted prostitute who is soon hauled off in a police raid, leaving the lanky adolescent to fend for himself, while looking after the neighbourhood stray, Pete (Ethan Dizon). The two make for a mischievously fraternal duo, slipping through the scorching months in an unglamorous borough where you must connive to survive.
So this is an Oliver Twist fable which hangs, sometimes uneasily, between pity and triumph. It glim- mers with moments of genuine comic warmth, while never neglecting the teary moments of crisis which accompany these bittersweet coming-of-age dramas.
Inevitable is not without its anxieties. It manages to overcome the usual trappings of a cathartic poverty tourism cinema with its consoling fables of human will in the face of adversity. But it also commits to a rather ragged stereotype of the African-American single mother and is not above moments of flared sentimentalism.
It is ultimately the calloused vulnerability of Mister and his charming older brother dynamic with Pete that gives the film its tender balance. — Kavish Chetty