Reviewed by KEVIN THOMAS Los Angeles Times
Original publication: 09/15/05
"Green Street Hooligans" serves up a lot of bone-crushing violence in an offbeat context with considerable style and energy, but the steady diet of brutal street-fighting makes it all but impossible to connect with this picture.
Elijah Wood's Matt Buckner is a Harvard journalism major two months from graduation when he's expelled for dealing drugs. He's not the guilty party, but he feels unable to take on the real culprit and his formidable political family.
For taking the fall he accepts a $10,000 payment and heads for London to visit his sister (Claire Forlani), where he immediately meets the younger brother, Pete (Charlie Hunnam), of his brother-in-law Steve (Marc Warren).
Pete is a rangy, charismatic fellow who is not merely a soccer fan but also the leader of a firm called Green Street Elite — really a gang, of rabid West Ham football fans. Matt, at loose ends, becomes a member of the gang — even though Pete's sour second-in-command, Bovver (Leo Gregory), opposes him because he's a Yank.
The GSE is committed to warfare with firms of other teams. When they're not slugging it out in the streets, sometimes with lethal consequences, they are boozing it up in their favorite pub. That the firm's members are, by and large, gainfully employed and have families just makes their addiction to violence seem all the more pathetic.
Wood is a sufficiently talented actor to be able to make persuasive the shattered and rootless Matt's vulnerability to the Green Street Elite with its endless opportunities to express aggression and its strong sense of belonging. But he lacks the physicality to seem a credible brawler, to the detriment of the picture.
The strongest plus is director and co-writer Lexi Alexander's ability to make understandable how these young — and not-so-young — men become intoxicated by violence. That's not the same thing as being able to identify or empathize with them.
At the end of the day they're just a pack of thugs, and the best that one can hope for them is that the Mafia adage applies: "We only kill each other."
Too bad these guys don't work things out on the mat or in the ring; ironically, Alexander is a former kickboxing and karate champion who made a deeply affecting Oscar-nominated dramatic short, "Johnny Flynton," about a boxer who strives to contain his aggressive feelings to his matches.
Alexander has tremendous energy, passion and filmmaking flair, but "Green Street Hooligans" careens out of control, culminating in all-out carnage interlaced with sentimental heroics. The only emotion it ultimately evokes is one of relief that, after 106 minutes of grown men getting off on beating each other up, it is over.
Copyright 2005 The Journal News, a Gannett Co. Inc. newspaper