Who remembers Steve Barron’s underappreciated mockumentary Mike Bassett: England Manager from the turn of the century? Nobody?
Never mind. We can make do with this perfectly serviceable variation on the theme from the versatile veteran Stephen Bradley. Fran the Man is, in fact, a big-screen upgrade for a plucky YouTube series that eventually made its way on to Setanta Sports. It doesn’t require much of a stretch to compare the series’ underdog advance with what becomes of the amateur soccer club St Peter’s Athletic in this theatrical incarnation.
Set in and about the characterful suburbs of Dublin, the film focuses on Fran (a dogged, amusing Darragh Humphreys), assistant manager of the club, who finds pressures mounting when they get drawn against Shamrock Rovers in the FAI Cup.
The attempts to up the stakes with a plot involving an international match-fixing scheme are, shall we say, a little strained, but the script never lets up on worthwhile one-liners. “We’ve had a tip-off from Interpol,” the coppers tell Fran. “They’re a team from Cyprus, aren’t they?” Fran replies. That will do well enough.
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The key technique here is – employing jargon from another sport – to flood the zone with as many classy comic actors as the budget can allow. Ardal O’Hanlon is untrustworthy as the team’s stroke-friendly manager. Deirdre O’Kane has fun with a creation perfectly suited to her famously raspy delivery: a sexually enthusiastic travel agent called Dympna Greene.
Naming Darren Dixon’s promising player Bobby Charlton feels like an odd choice until we learn that his mother, played by a hard-working Amy Huberman, is called Jackie. Again, that will do well enough for a quick laugh.
It wouldn’t do to overanalyse Fran the Man, but it does properly connect with the selfless enthusiasm that drives professional and semi-professional sport. There is a sense of an Ireland only peripherally altered by the social changes of the past 30 years – a nation that is still at home to the ramshackle.
One minor observation. Is Risteárd Cooper’s detective the first copper in an Irish film to appear wearing the tie of a Trinity College Dublin graduate? It is, I guess, something for them to discuss on the Blu-ray extras.
In cinemas from Friday, April 11th
