There’s unwatchable, and then there’s Green Street Hooligans 2, a cinematic beating so persistent, so brainless, it feels not so much like a sequel as a hostage situation. The sheer fatuousness of it makes you yearn for the subtlety and wit of the “Play of the Week” sketches at your local sixth-form. It’s not just that this is a bad movie; it’s that it’s a bad idea for a movie, manufactured not with passion or even cynical cash-grab energy, but with a kind of moronic resignation. Every frame, every groaning chunk of dialogue, every pratfall masquerading as “acting” screams: we didn’t want to be here, either.
You almost admire the anti-logic of it. The first “Green Street,” for all its knuckle-headed bravado and Charlie Hunnam’s Cockney so outrageous it bordered on hate crime, understood football’s tribal fever. This one? Throw out the football, toss the fans in a peculiarly American-looking “British” prison, and hope the audience’s brains are too pulped to notice that someone’s swapped Millwall for Milhouse and East End grit for Albuquerque stucco. The only “firm” here is the bloat in the script.
The acting is the sort of cataclysmic, fingernails-on-chalkboard ordeal you expect from a traffic safety video or a hostage tape. It’s not that Ross McCall is lost, it’s that watching him flail is like catching a dog locked in a car on a hot day, pitiful and uncomfortable, and you feel guilty for looking away. He’s Orson Welles next to the rest: a menagerie of braying men in glue-on stubble, their “accents” veering through continents like a drunken SatNav. And over it all, Marina Sirtis, performing as if she’s desperate for RADA to revoke her credentials, bellows and postures with such glazed ineptitude you half expect Security to wrestle her off set. Each of her lines is a fresh affront to language, culture, and the viewer’s patience. If you could bottle cringe, she’d be the distillery.
And then come the Russians, are they really football fans, or did the director’s mate run out of mobster work in some third-rate action flick? It’s a steam shovel of stereotypes, shovelling up bodies and nonsense with the grace of an acid reflux. The violence, the one arrow left in the film’s battered quiver, is shot so poorly and so pointlessly you’d swear you were watching failed auditions for “Gladiators: Nil Points Edition.” Every fight peters out, like a dancer mid-sneeze, offering the excitement of stagnant tea and about as much dramatic consequence.
What passes for a plot, something about officers out to get the GSE, kidnappings, and a football match to determine who gets paroled, as if the Home Office is now run by Monty Python, plays like a fever-dream written in crayons. It’s not just that none of it’s believable; it’s that it’s not even trying. Even the worst straight-to-DVD dreck usually fakes a wink, a smirk at its own impossibility. This one looks at you stone-faced and demands you take its cartoon prison politics seriously.
And what is this lighting, this pacing? Who edited this, a sleepwalking butcher? Did they lose the footage and shoot again on weekends in someone’s uncle’s carpet warehouse? The only thing vaguely alive is the frantic, cheap punk soundtrack, one cough of energy in a morgue of cinematic stillbirth.
Director Jesse V. Johnson, whose CV reads like a love letter to Cinemax’s 2 a.m. slot, serves up the most deracinated, misbegotten, witless “British” prison ever committed to film. You long for the minor pleasures, say, the errant football; a moment of camaraderie; even Charlie Hunnam’s mutant Cockney, anything with a pulse. Instead it’s a conga line of misjudgments, a howling void where story, character, and even basic professional pride ought to be.
The only law “Green Street Hooligans 2” enforces is that stupidity is infinite, hope is futile, and artistic standards are for mugs. If there’s a worse sequel, I haven’t seen it, and I hope I never do. This is not cinema. It’s a mugging. And the real victim is you.
