REVIEWED - GREEN STREET As West Ham United FC return to the Premiership, writes Michael Dwyer, Green Street depicts some of its supporters as rabid, violent sociopaths far more interested in getting into fights with rival supporters than in the football, which is "mediocre", according to the leader of the gang (Charlie Hunnam).
These are beer-swilling, rhyming slang-spouting louts, vividly brought to life by the movie's talented British actors.
Rippling with aggressive energy, Hunnam plays a young man who teaches history and PE to schoolboys by day and gleefully compares the conflict between West Ham and Millwall supporters to the relationship between the Israelis and Palestinians. In fact, he gets to do quite a lot of explaining over the course of a movie that, in an obvious attempt to reach US audiences, contrives to have American characters in two of the leading roles.
One is a Harvard journalism student (Elijah Wood) who takes the fall for his wealthy roommate when drugs are found in their residence. Expelled, he goes to London, where his sister (Claire Forlani) is married to a reformed football hooligan (Marc Warren), whose brother (Hunnam) gets the Yank into a melee without hours of landing at Heathrow.
This numbing, despairing picture, which inevitably builds to a bloodbath, suffers from a distinct sense of deja vu, given that it follows a narrative arc so familiar from such superior films as The Firm and The Football Factory, and director Lexi Alexander, a German former karate and kickboxing champion on her feature film debut, ladles the movie with melodramatic excess. It doesn't help that Wood is much too physically slight to be remotely convincing in the fussily edited fight scenes.
