Never Had a Chance review – a slice of gritty British Asian life with a side of drug dealing and addiction

This gritty crime drama unfolds entirely within the Punjabi community in London’s Hounslow district, a plausible demographic situation in which white people are so peripheral to the story that they are little more than extras. In fact watching this well-crafted, if somewhat melodramatic, debut for director Jazz Bhalla makes one wonder why there aren’t more films made in the UK with entirely British Asian casts. Here, it doesn’t makes the film better or worse, but it certainly feels realistic and true to its milieu.

The story revolves around two best friends in their 20s, Ravi (Amar Chaggar) and Jay (Jayant Singh), likely lads who spend a lot of time hanging out, getting high or drunk and ending nearly every sentence with the word “bro”. On the face of it, Jay seems like the one with a more stable situation at home, living with his middle-class parents; while Ravi, who has a criminal record due to a drug bust, lives in a bedsit and is estranged from his mother ever since his father died and she remarried, much to the chagrin of his bossy older sister (Parvinder Shergill). But Ravi manages to get a job working for a building supply merchant, which compels him to start waking up at dawn and considering the downside of always being hung over. Plus, he might be in with a chance with pretty fast-food vendor Sukhi (Tina Sharma), an ambitious young woman keen to get away from her alcoholic father and drug-dealing brother.

It gradually becomes clear that, for all his charm and chat, Jay isn’t all that put together either. For starters, he has a growing gambling addiction, which isn’t helped when he gets a wodge of cocaine to sell for another drug dealer and starts getting high on a supply that isn’t really his at all. It’s not hard to see how all these dramatic freight trains might converge into one big conflagration of bad choices and worse luck, and that overdetermination is something of a flaw here.

But Bhalla, who has previously worked mostly as a gaffer on other films, draws solid performances out of his cast, and the package as a whole is persuasive throughout, never more so than when it is evoking the faintly toxic yet jovial world of men in strip-lit social clubs, shooting pool and trash-talking one another just to pass the time – even though, to paraphrase Samuel Beckett, it would have passed anyway.