There are bad movies, and then there are bad movies that drag down your evening like a wet mattress, so bloated and lumpy you wonder whose idea of a good time this was supposed to be. And then, just occasionally, there are bad movies with Scott Adkins: a category unto itself, and, for a certain breed of cinematic masochist (and I count myself among them), a kind of siren song. Green Street Hooligans 3: Never Back Down is not the sort of film that graces anyone’s “Best of the Decade” lists. But if you’ve ever found yourself shouting “Boyka!” at the TV as Adkins performs a flying scissor kick on some lumpen fool, well, perhaps you, too, have a perverse curiosity to see just how low the man will go for a paycheck.
The original Green Street was a generic mob movie in hooligan drag, think Lock, Stock with less charm, less wit, and more boneheaded testosterone, a British import designed to convince Americans that soccer in the UK is a matter of life and death (mainly death). Then came the sequel, one of those straight-to-video atrocities with the crabbed, uncooked flavor of something that had spent less time in the oven than the plastic clamshell it shipped in. For the third outing, they brought in James Nunn, a director who, on a good day with the right script, can deliver a pulse. Alas, this is not that day.
Watching Green Street 3 is like drinking flat lager at a pub where the barman spits in your glass because your scarf isn’t the right color. The premise has the sticky fingerprints of Direct-to-DVD sweat all over it: Scott Adkins as Danny Harvey, ex-leader of the Green Street Elite, now running an MMA gym north of the border until family tragedy Has Him Return to the Life. If you’ve begun composing a bingo card of clichés, one last fight, dead brother, a pub called the Abbey, a barkeep love interest, corrupt cops - you may as well throw it out. This movie doesn’t even pretend to care about narrative stakes. In Adkins’ career, this is Boyka without the accent, without the signature spin, and, distressingly, almost without the joy.
The real heartbreak is this: Scott Adkins is the kind of action star whose sinews and kicks are usually more eloquent than anything coming out of his mouth. With the right choreography (see Avengement), he’s a beautiful, blunt instrument, an energy source that could power the British grid for a week. Here, it’s as if the camera operator hated action scenes. Every time Adkins squares off, a lovely moment of anticipation for those of us who delight in his balletic violence, we get a cutaway to the reaction of Gilly or Big John, or (worst sin of all) a quick edit that hides who is meant to be hitting whom. It’s like paying for a ticket to the Bolshoi and then being forced to watch the audience eat their popcorn.
And the rest? The supporting cast has all the intimidating menace of a row of mannequins in off-brand tracksuits. Gilly, tasked with leading the GSE, is about as threatening as a rugby scrum at a wi-fi café. If the Green Street Elite were once feared, the mere sight of these chubby, slack-jawed hangers-on would reassure even a grannie with a West Ham mug that she’s safe on the Jubilee Line. You keep waiting for someone with a spark, maybe Kacey Barnfield, the film’s single shot at charisma, only to find she’s been marooned as “the girl,” collateral damage in a sea of bad characterizations.
Football, theoretically the soul of this saga, has never felt more incidental. The film plays out as a 5-vs-5 underground fighting tournament, except the you can almost hear the wheeze and clatter of a scriptwriter recycling Rocky IV for the twenty-fifth time. Montages pile up like spam emails. The actual matches are so overedited, so infatuated with quick cuts, that even Adkins’ trusty roundhouse barely registers as a ripple in the muddy plot.
And the plot itself, a retread so predictable you could storyboard it on a beermat, limps through all the necessary stations of Hooligan Cinema: the fallen leader, the redemption arc, the firm rivalry, the “big secret” death. There’s a trace of something almost juicy in the notion of Danny tracking his brother’s killer through a labyrinth of betrayal, but every twist lands with the gravity of a balloon. The ending, a face-off in a caged arena, aspires to the grandeur of Gladiator and makes it about as far as a local pub’s pool league.
All that’s left to do, then, is marvel at Adkins’ professionalism. You can tell he’s working hard to sell this, his screen presence is still wire-taut, his fighting still a minor marvel (when you catch more than half a second of it). It’s a little like watching a premier dancer forced to pirouette in gumboots: you admire the effort, even as the costume fills you with grief.
And so, you wonder: is it so bad, it loops back to good? Only for the connoisseur of trash, the sort who measures their life in DTV action flicks and has a soft spot for watching real talent slum it amid the ruins of better movies. For the rest, Green Street Hooligans 3 is a lesson in diminishing returns, a carnival of cliché that confuses grunting for drama and noise for energy.
But for the faithful, for the strange breed of Scott Adkins devotees who pride themselves on suffering through the worst so others might avoid it, well, at least he’s in it. Sometimes that’s all that needs saying.
