Rating R. Where will a hardcore mobster go who wants to discuss urgent cases with his business partner in such a way as to eliminate the possibility of unnecessary witnesses? There is a high probability that our hero will go to church on a weekday, where he can hear only the Lord God himself, who, however, has never been a witness to the prosecution at the hearing. Where can the two congressmen, without attracting any attention, talk about the details of their ambitious plans for a government transition? All in the same church - they will not even have to wait for the day when conscientious parishioners will be too busy with everyday affairs to think about their soul, they may well get lost in the crowd and in a quiet corner to pull off an old trick, hiding the secret in plain sight. Where can a group of seventeen-year-old boys find the most depraved girls in the city, longing for male love and affection and ready to break any prohibitions? It is enough to go to a female Catholic school, where righteous nuns, who have long forgotten what it is like to be a representative of the fair sex, because once something did not work out for them, take out their disappointment on a new generation. In the series of church obscurantism, one should not forget about the altar boys, who, like all the above-mentioned seemingly God-fearing, and in the soul empty, frightened and indifferent, characters, do not differ in a high level of morality and have more than once become heroes of caustic pictures of growing up. The McManus brothers are familiar with the morals of church teenagers not by hearsay - once their father, thanks to whom they began making films, received his first video camera as a gift from him, was one of these boys, and once told his sons that he decided to be part of funeral services only because it gave the opportunity to miss lessons and many other pleasant bonuses for a high school student. The brothers have always gravitated towards the genre of drama and, hearing the story of his father, they realized that they could combine it with the idea of one of their early short films, telling about a teenager who found a gun and wanted to try it out in action, and create their first full-length film “The Funeral Kings”, which tells about a crazy week, during which three fourteen-year-old guys begin to get acquainted with the “charmies” of adult life.
Teenagers making the first step to the next stage have always been favorite characters of cinema, and appeared in works of all genres, starting with serious dramas in which young main characters reach for experiments to the ladies a little older and sometimes even get it, and ending with numerous comedies, about three modest students of middle or high school who are chosen for the first party in life to show themselves and in the process win the most beautiful girl in the district. Growing up by the McManus brothers is a real gun that, like any real gun, should eventually fire, a crazy hunt for R-rated movies, paedophile fathers, a young stepmother's breasts, smoking and grand plans instead of dull school routines, running across town with a bloodied dog wrapped in a towel, and even revealing a local drug-trafficking network that lurks cozy under the shadow of a local video rental sign. The filmmakers teeter on the verge of black humor and the semblance of a very serious film about children, living among people who at fifteen start dealing drugs, at sixteen get a firearm, and at seventeen begin to serve their first prison term. The main characters of the picture are like white niggers - they reproduce the pattern of behavior created in their neighborhood, and look for a way to assert themselves not only through trying to attract the attention of older girls, but also trying to talk cool, act cool and think cool. But instead of gradually revealing the topical theme of growing up in a bad place, the McManus brothers became fixated on external attributes, trying to cram as many adult things as possible into their childhood story, and eventually that desire left the rest of their picture's ideas in their infancy.
Each hero of the film has his own pain - someone is experiencing a family tragedy and learns that his beloved father was a prick on individuals too young for him, someone lives with the stigma of "the younger brother of this criminal," and someone is just trying to make people take themselves a little more seriously. Funeral Kings doesn’t reveal the characters’ inner emotions, they just showcase a week in their lives, during which our altar boys reflect on women, alcohol, cigarettes, movies, talk about anything but what made them this group of rebellious hermits who spend their days trying to find a way to get a horror movie at the box office that is not allowed to be seen by people under eighteen. The McManus brothers are not capturing any important stage and it is not possible to say what exactly those seven days made of boys men, or that it is this week that will determine what their lives will be like in high school, or even that for the first time they faced a really serious situation that requires them to act like adults, not at all, Funeral Kings is just a modest guidebook to the life of a fourteen-year-old boy and his simple, not without his strange charm, but does not make any attempts to penetrate a little further than the classic alcohol-cigarette rebellion of the early teens.