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Originally made for TV by acclaimed director Alan Clarke, this remains the primary film text about 1980s English soccer hooliganism. The Firm opens on 18 September The five best football hooligan flicks Reviews are likely to be sympathetic audiences might have preferred an endearingly jocular Danny Dyer bleeding all over his Burberry.īest scene: Dom is humiliated for daring to wear the exact same bright-red Ellesse tracksuit as top boy Bex. The few fight scenes have an authentic-seeming, messy, tentative aspect, bigger on bravado than bloodshed. Love savvily shifts The Firm's protagonist from psycho hard man Bex (memorably played by Gary Oldman in the original) to young recruit Dom (Calum McNab, excellent). The Firm represents a maturing step up from Love's recent geezer-porn efforts, or, more accurately, a return to the bittersweet tone of his critically praised but little-seen feature debut, Goodbye Charlie Bright.
#THE FIRM 2009 SCENE MOVIE#
Danny Dyer may spend the movie haunted by a portent of his own violent demise, but that doesn't stop him amusingly relishing his chosen lifestyle, while modelling a covetable wardrobe of terrace chic. Humour helps, too, which is why Nick Love's 2004 effort The Football Factory (tagline: "What else you gonna do on a Saturday?") is the genre's most straightforwardly enjoyable entry. Ladle on the moralising, but don't stint on the punching, kicking and scary weaponry. The latter is the more fanciful tale of an undercover cop (Reece Dinsdale) who finds new meaning in his life when he's assigned to infiltrate the violent fans of fictional London team Shadwell.ĭespite the earnest trappings, this genre recognises that the audience is most likely to be young men who are, have been or aspired to be hooligans.
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The former is the true story of Jamaican-born Cass Pennant, who grew up the target of racist bullies until he found respect and a sense of belonging with West Ham's Inter City Firm (them again). Presumably the woefulness of the latter's London accent was not evident to the film's German director, Lexi Alexander.Ī quest for identity powers football-violence movies as various as Cass (tagline: "The hardest fight is finding out who you are") and ID ("When you go undercover remember one thing.
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Casting didn't help any, since the young American was played by boyish, 5ft 6in former Hobbit Elijah Wood, and his mentor by Geordie Queer as Folk star Charlie Hunnam. The risible Green Street (2005) tried the same trick with the implausible tale of a Harvard student visiting his sister in London, earning his stripes with West Ham's Green Street elite. We don't doubt this is all rooted in authentic experiences.Īwaydays uses the familiar device of the outsider breaking in, providing an easy focal point for audience empathy. Whatever you think of the films of former model/football hooligan Love, you have to hand it to him: he knows his clothes and his music.Īn even greater specificity informs the big-screen adaptation of Kevin Sampson's Wirral-set novel Awaydays, which concerned aspiring Tranmere Rovers hooligan/arty post-punk music fan Carty and his closeted gay pal Elvis, ricocheting between the ruck and Echo & the Bunnymen gigs in 1979-80. And as we follow the fortunes of Bex and co's West Ham Crew as they compete with Millwall and Portsmouth to be the top dogs of England, we're nourished by amiable nostalgia for fashion-forward primary-coloured tracksuits and such mid-1980s soul classics as Rene & Angela's "I'll Be Good". After all, football violence ain't what it used to be.
#THE FIRM 2009 SCENE UPDATE#
That's why the cockney auteur has been able to knock out The Firm while waiting for financing for his big-screen remake of The Sweeney.įor his take on Alan Clarke's celebrated 1988 original, Love has resisted the temptation to update the action to the present. F or film investors, there's no such thing as a sure thing, but a low-budget picture about football hooligans directed by Nick Love comes close.