From elf to whiny thug wannabe
Matthew Ralph

As a 19-year-old college student studying abroad in London in the late '90s, it didn't take long for me to develop a fascination with football hooliganism. In fact, it took only the mention of the term by a sociology professor to send me off in search of information, anything I could get my hands on, about the tragic extremes — 95 fans crushed to death in Liverpool in 1989, 39 crushed to death during riots four years earlier in Brussels — that had been brought on by violent allegiance to football clubs.

My professor's recommendation of the Don Buford book "Among the Thugs" proved to be the best introduction to a vast volume of material on the subject. That Buford was an American who himself got swept away, by admission, too far into the world of a band of Manchester thugs served me well as a reader as unfamiliar with the subject as the author himself when he set out on his journey. Though shockingly dark in its first-person description of an underworld compared by many reviewers to that of the cult film Clockwork Orange, it's fascinating at every turn to read of Buford's exploits with a band of thugs. This isn't Yankees fans chanting about Pedro Martinez' sexuality or Red Sox fans printing shirts with offensive remarks directed at Derek Jeter. It's total depravity. And it's totally intriguing.

That brings us to the recent film, "Green Street Hooligans." The storyline is vaguely similar — an American would-be journalist shows up to England asking lots of questions about soccer, finds himself in a firm, gets in a fight and next thing you know he's another bloke on the train with a club scarf and a 16-ounce can of ale in his hand. More specifically, in the case of British actor Lexi Alexander's debut feature, it's a whiny might-as-well-be-Elijah-Wood-playing-himself cast as an award-winning Harvard journalism student who is expelled from school (he took the fall and some payoff dough for a pompous prick of a cokehead roommate). As the main character Matt Buckner, Wood figures prominently in the film and is perhaps most to blame for what I would consider one of those movies so bad it's worth watching just to make fun of.

To be fair to Wood, there are several reasons why this "drama" was literally a joke to a New York audience in its first weekend running stateside. The script is cluttered with a grab-bag of Americans in London cliche and awful Fight Club references — What happens in football, stays in football? You can't be serious? — and suffers ultimately from taking itself so, to use a purposefully bad pun, bloody serious. Overwrought scenes with Buckner and his sister Shannon (Claire Forlani), who "ran" to London after the death of their mother and married a retired major in the West Ham firm (who turned the reputation battling over to younger brother Pete (Charlie Hunnan) and pledged he'd never return) become increasingly more painful to watch as the plot progresses. Long pauses and whiny lines delivered by the hopeless wuss turned thug overnight (after getting a credit card stuffed in his mouth) literally produced laughter from this particular New York audience.

In fact, walking out onto Broadway, I overheard a young lady with a British accent comment, "That was bloody awful. It was basically a comedy." She honestly took the words right out of my mouth on that one.

Some, of course, leaving the theater took the film seriously and questioned out loud why everyone was laughing so much. But really, can you blame them for not laughing at even the mention of a once cute child actor who perhaps will forever now be known as an elf in Lord of the Rings playing a thug who beats people up? Yeah, exactly. As comedic as the idea and execution of Wood's Razzie-worthy performance (which to me echoes Hayden Christenson's dreadful monotone in Episode II), the killer of the film has to be the soundtrack, in particular the seemingly-never-ending adult contemporary song in the final West Side Story-esque fight sequence down by the "wharf". Here, these British hard-asses are pounding skulls, Gangs of New York-style, blood squirting everywhere, and some dude is singing this painful ballad. It's yet another example, in an increasing number of films taking a similar approach, of a soundtrack inserting itself way too much in a film. How many times do I have to say this? Your iPod playlist (Zach Braff and friends) does not make a good soundtrack for a movie.

All that said, do yourself a favor and see for yourself how remarkably awful this film is and then go read "Among the Thugs" if you are still interested in the so-called underbelly of British football. You'll learn something not quite so cliche and find context to laugh at what is overall just a poor, poor attempt at telling a story that ends worthy of a made-for-Lifetime feature forcing a message about knowing when to take a stand and knowing when to walk away (seriously, did we need to have the main character say that in a voice over as he so predictably goes back to the states to take revenge on his prick ex-roommate?)

Seriously, can someone please tell me how this stinker of a movie won the jury and audience prize at the South By Southwest Film Festival?

posted [10.05.05]

posted [09.06.05]

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