Green Street

As a fish-out-of-water piece, you’d have to admit that Green Street is audacious. It’s not everyday that a blood-splattering football beat-‘em-up featuring Elijah Wood – bless his little webbed socks - as a visiting American West Ham hooligan comes along, although the diminutive actor’s valiant efforts to avoid Mark Hamill Syndrome have already seen him get up to much worse. Remember his impressively dweebish knicker-sniffing in Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind and mute cannibal-butchery in Sin City?
Nice idea then. Shame Green Street isn’t quite up there with those films. Or Football Factory. Or even Mike Bassett: England Manager. Directed by, of all things, a German woman, the film struggles to strike a tone between Hollywood melodrama (the kind with violins) and ITV diet kitchen-sink special (no violins, but lots of men shouting at the sky). Parts of the plot are borderline John Hughes – Frodo gets kicked out of Harvard after being framed by one of the bigger boys and takes refuge in London with his appallingly sappy married sister (Forlani – what has she done to her lovely mouth?)
There, inspired by one of his Hammer crazed English inlaws (the lovely Charlie Hunnam) he learns to drink ale and lay into the equally up-for-it fans of opposing teams. When surging forward on a testosterone buzz, Green Street finds its feet. There is, perhaps disturbingly, a certain visceral charge from the spectacle of England’s hardest firms going at it and tossing over any telephone boxes that dare stand in their way. But when the film gets around to debunking the glamour and maiming its heroes, it loses all momentum.
No matter. By then, the flimsy, ludicrous plotting has already ensured that the film has lost all street cred. Yet we do like the look of Mr. Hunnam, a gentlemen with a terrible physical affliction, which has left him looking like a younger, tauter Brad Pitt. Shame he can’t quite master the accent, despite actually being English.
Really, you can forget the bubbles. Green Street just blows. As a fish-out-of-water piece, you’d have to admit that Green Street is audacious. It’s not everyday that a blood-splattering football beat-‘em-up featuring Elijah Wood – bless his little webbed socks - as a visiting American West Ham hooligan comes along, although the diminutive actor’s valiant efforts to avoid Mark Hamill Syndrome have already seen him get up to much worse. Remember his impressively dweebish knicker-sniffing in Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind and mute cannibal-butchery in Sin City?
Nice idea then. Shame Green Street isn’t quite up there with those films. Or Football Factory. Or even Mike Bassett; England Manager. Directed by, of all things, a German woman, the film struggles to strike a tone between Hollywood melodrama (the kind with violins) and ITV diet kitchen-sink special (no violins, but lots of men shouting at the sky). Parts of the plot are borderline John Hughes – Frodo gets kicked out of Harvard after being framed by one of the bigger boys and takes refuge in London with his appallingly sappy married sister (Forlani – what has she done to her lovely mouth?)
There, inspired by one of his Hammer crazed English inlaws (the lovely Charlie Hunnam) he learns to drink ale and lay into the equally up-for-it fans of opposing teams. When surging forward on a testosterone buzz, Green Street finds its feet. There is, perhaps disturbingly, a certain visceral charge from the spectacle of England’s hardest firms going at it and tossing over any telephone boxes that dare stand in their way. But when the film gets around to debunking the glamour and maiming its heroes, it loses all momentum.
No matter. By then, the flimsy, ludicrous plotting has already ensured that the film has lost all street cred. Yet we do like the look of Mr. Hunnam, a gentlemen with a terrible physical affliction, which has left him looking like a younger, tauter Brad Pitt. Shame he can’t quite master the accent, despite actually being English.
Really, you can forget the bubbles. Green Street just blows.