Weekly Review -- Fighting the bad fight

Green Street Hooligans (2005) -- The male bonding film trend occasionally falls into two categories -- works with a farcical perspective and works involving inspirational sports metaphors. Sometimes a too-cool-for-school cinematic martini such as Doug Liman's Swingers slips through the shallow cracks, and sometimes we get a film like Lexi Alexander's Green Street Hooligans, which tests the spirit of male camaraderie as it braves the elements of a strictly delineated code.

When Harvard journalism student Matt Buckner (Elijah Wood) is wrongfully expelled, he travels to London to visit his sister (Claire Forlani) and her family. Soon afterward, he meets her brother-in-law Pete (Charlie Hunnam), who introduces Matt to his firm, an outfit of football hooligans. Entering a secretive lifestyle and finding a place to belong for the very first time, Matt also starts participating in the violence that comes with the territory. What he is not counting on is a rival firm's growing extremism...

Right off the bat, I will say that I have never been and will never be able to understand brutality and fanaticism for the sake of anything, let alone a sport. However, do not go into this film expecting bloody barbarians senselessly murdering one another, with the story taking the back seat. Sure, the fights shown are savage, but it is the core of morality and character that drives this narrative, turning it from what might seem like a conventional sports-oriented piece into a tale of unbreakable friendships. The screenplay pays attention to the people inhabiting its pages, never portraying them as cartoonish stereotypes that they could have been; rather, it sees them as complex, fallible, tragic figures. I would have been interested in seeing more of Matt's background with his sister and Pete's with his brother, since the entire context of a football family could have been broadened through the clearer context of the biological ones. The cinematography by Alexander Buono, who had also painted the aesthetics of the fantastically underrated 2003 chiller Dead End, is a perfect fit. Steely and smoggy, it evokes an atmosphere of urban decay and constant surveillance, a real life feeling that is undoubtedly one of the factors contributing to Great Britain's problem of football violence. At one point, one of the characters even refers to Britain as a country under the watchful eye of Big Brother.

The cast is well chosen. Wood gives an effective performance, depicting a true evolution from a naive and confused boy to a tough and confident young man. Hunnam shines as the truly charismatic and often misguided Pete, who places integrity and loyalty above all else, who gives bear hugs to friends right after beating an adversary to a pulp. Leo Gregory is good as Bower, Pete's best friend and utterly weak-willed individual, and Forlani gives a poignant portrayal of a sister and mother caught up in the mayhem.

Green Street Hooligans is one of those works that appear out of nowhere and take the viewer by surprise. Through the prism of its unsavory subject matter, it examines concepts like family, friendship and honor, not veering into melodrama or preachiness for even a second. The film is a fascinating look at a sadistic sub-culture, one that paradoxically breeds closeness among its members just as much as it breeds unnecessary divisions among human beings.

8/10