AS PART of the Teen Spirit strand of the Film Festival, Akseli Tuomivaara's film blends a coming-of-age story with a small-town-boy-dreams-of-better theme, but never quite manages to amount to more than the sum of its parts.
Korso is a district of Vantaa, a city near Helsinki. It's where school dropout and aspiring delinquent Markus hangs out in a disused factory with his boorish friends and obsesses about "streetball", a free-form variant of basketball whose stars can earn big bucks. Thinking he has the moves, Markus plans a trip to New York to take part but buys the plane ticket with money borrowed from the local badass. What follows is a pretty predictable spiral of desperate petty crime (to repay the debt), recriminations and second thoughts (see above), self-abnegating benders (if you think the Scots have a problem with alcohol, you've never seen the Finns) and, thanks to his younger sister's black boyfriend, an undercurrent of racial tension that plays out brutally in an underpass and, comically, on a makeshift basketball court where Markus learns that white men really can't jump. Solid rather than scintillating.
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