Green Street

It used to be nearly impossible for Brits to venture abroad without a chatty foreigner acknowledging our nationality by mock-clenching his fists and exclaiming, ‘Oh yes, football ’ooligans!’ But that was the ’80s. Does it take that long for cinema to catch up with the real world? No, we’ve already had ‘The Firm’, ‘ID’ and ‘Football Factory’ – all better films about football violence. This strong sense of redundancy aside, though, ‘Green Street’ never recovers from a fatal and, frankly, crazy premise. German director Lexi Alexander gives us Elijah Wood as Matt, a Harvard journalism drop-out who becomes a West Ham-supporting football hooligan while visiting his sister (Claire Forlani) in London. Harvard? Hooligan? Elijah Wood? I can understand Wood’s desire to ditch his freaky elf image, but this is beyond credible. And it gets worse. Charlie Hunnam (last seen writhing beneath Aiden Gillen in TV’s ‘Queer as Folk’) delivers a truly appalling performance as Pete, a home-grown Brit thug and Matt’s conduit into hooliganism. Pete is London born and bred, so why does Hunnam’s accent swing violently from Dublin to Sydney, only occasionally stopping on home turf? And the idea that Matt’s background in media studies puts him in mortal danger among his fellow hooligans is no less ludicrous. A disaster (of a) film.