There’s a kind of tourist satisfaction, I imagine, in donning your stone-washed jeans and slouching into Green Street Hooligans like an American exchange student ordering a pint in a smoky East London pub and hoping nobody notices his accent, except of course that’s the whole point. For the length of two hours, you can be inducted into the sacred rituals of football fandom, which, in this film, are less about the beautiful game than the less beautiful art of knocking a rival’s teeth out on the pavement. In the annals of cinematic culture clash, this film gives us Elijah Wood, yes, Frodo, the most cherubic of hobbits, stumbling into the maw of West Ham United’s Green Street Elite and coming out shouting “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles.” Beware the man who sings showtunes after breaking someone’s nose.
It’s both entirely improbable and perversely enjoyable, which, I suppose, is what passes for excitement in the mid-2000s mid-budget world. The best that can be said of Lexi Alexander’s ragged brawler is that it knows what it wants to be: a testosteroned-up, pint-fueled peek into the tribal rite of English football hooliganism. It delivers on its promise, there are brooding pub corners, snarling threats in Cockney rhyming slang, and enough massed brawls to suggest that the real national sport involves less footwork on grass than footwork in the mud outside the stadium.
But about the only thing flimsier than Pete Dunham’s leadership of the GSE is the film’s story, which aspires to Shakespearean tragedy but can’t muster up the poetry of the back of a bus ticket. After a prologue that has Elijah Wood’s Matt Buckner expelled from Harvard for a coke offense that isn’t his (because of course Ivy Leaguers are always just a misunderstood hash away from fistfights in Canning Town), we’re off to London, where every pint is a prelude to a punch-up, and every conversation proceeds as if the world is about to erupt into a Greek chorus of “Oi!” and flying bottles. The narrative is little more than an excuse to get us from one skirmish to the next, the plotlines stitched together as haphazardly as a battle-scarred GSE member’s face.
The film occasionally gestures toward emotional undercurrents: the longing for loyalty, a kind of bastard brotherhood, the weary sadness of men who know nothing except belonging to a crowd that gives meaning to bruises. But it all runs a bit thin, just enough sentiment to slap over the fact that these groups, in reality, would frighten you more than they’d enchant you. While the real sociological underbelly of football riot culture, the territorialism, the hypermasculinity, the strange need for significance is ripe and ready for a complex, searching examination, Green Street Hooligans is more interested in barnstorming through the clichés. The film never manages to interrogate the violence, only to invigorate it. It’s Fight Club without Freud, The Football Factory with an American accent and less self-awareness.
Elijah Wood throws himself into it gamely, all enormous blue eyes and shredded knuckles, but you keep waiting for someone to pause and ask how a 5’6” former Harvard journalist has caught the knack of East End brawling overnight. Credibility isn’t so much bent here as lamped outside Upton Park and left for dead. By the time the finale rolls round, all monumental sacrifice and grim self-justification, you wonder if the filmmakers genuinely believe they’ve delivered a grand tragedy, or if they’re winking at the unlikelihood of it all. And as for Charlie Hunnam’s “London” accent, if this is what passes for authenticity, then Dick Van Dyke’s ghost must be rolling in his Mary Poppins grave. Even the more seasoned British cast members look as if they’re hamming it up for a lost episode of EastEnders.
But is it fun? Well, yes, and in that admission lies the film’s modest success. Curiosity and nostalgia (oh, those roaring 2000s terraces) sweep you along, who hasn’t, at least once, wanted to abandon caution, responsibility, and social grace in favor of a mad charge through a city street to beat up a perfect stranger in the name of sporting glory? The film indulges this anarchic fantasy, knowing full well it cannot afford subtlety or plausibility. It’s an amusement park ride for those who never got over schoolyard scraps, and maybe for a night in with beer and mates, that’s enough.
The ending, alas, sinks beneath even the film’s already shallow credulity, with the American David standing victorious over Goliath, whistling the anthem of West Ham and sauntering away as if beating up a trust-funded cokehead might redeem anything but the Harvard tuition bill. The arc, such as it is, flatlines just as the fists do; our hero goes home a little tougher, a little savvier, and of course, wholly unchanged underneath.
Green Street Hooligans is content to be a tourist’s primer on violence with a dash of masculine sentimentality ladled over the top, not much of a meal, but perhaps, for a certain mood, comfort food. It’s neither insightful nor original, but like its unlikely protagonist, it somehow gets away with more than you’d expect though not, in the end, as much as it thinks. If you’re after depth, best look elsewhere. If you want Frodo swinging fists in a cockamamie accent storm and don’t mind the bruises to your intelligence, well, mate, you’re already at the right pub.
