Green Street
(dir. Lexi Alexander)
Or what Frodo did next. Tired of mixing it with Orcs and the like, it turns out he decided to test his skills against an altogether different fighting challenge; the football hooligans of England.
Promising journalist Matt (Elijah Wood) gets set-up and thrown out of Harvard, so he heads to London to catch up with his sister. Thanks to her brother-in-law, he wastes no time getting in with a West Ham ‘firm’ and into a series of pitched battles with rival supporters. When I say he wastes no time, literally on the same day he sets foot in Heathrow he later has his teeth knocked out by a Birmingham City thug.
It’s an interesting idea, what attracts young men to the world of football violence, but I’m sure it has been done better elsewhere. The shoe-horning of an American tourist into the story doesn’t sit comfortably, it feels that the desire to get a Hollywood name on-board comes at the expense of deeper analysis into the minds of the gang members.
The supporting chavs are believable with special mentions to Mark E. Smith lookalike ‘Bovver’ and Geoff Bell, who gives another fine display of London menace (as previously seen in The Business). However, the film is let down by the casting of the leads. Considering he has a psychotic aversion to ‘Yanks and Foreigners’ the leader of the gang talks like a South African Tim Westwood and Elijah Wood looks as lost as, well, as an American trying to understand the offside rule.
Certainly not a date movie and probably more suited to a well-scripted TV drama, it’s better than a kick in the teeth and there are certainly plenty of those in the 90 odd minutes.
28th Apr 2006 - Tumblr
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