“Green Street Hooligans” serves up a lot of bone-crushing violence in an offbeat context with considerable style and energy, but the steady diet of brutal street-fighting makes it all but impossible to connect with this picture, despite whatever visceral appeal it may offer.
Elijah Wood’s Matt Buckner is a Harvard journalism major two months from graduation when he’s expelled for dealing drugs.
He’s not the guilty party, but he feels unable to take on the real culprit and his formidable political family.
For taking the fall he accepts a $10,000 payment and heads for London to visit his sister (Claire Forlani), where he immediately meets the younger brother, Pete (Charlie Hunnam), of his brother-in-law Steve (Marc Warren).
Pete is a rangy, charismatic fellow who is not merely a soccer fan but also the leader of the Green Street Elite, a “firm,” a euphemism for gang, which rabidly supports the West Ham football team.
Matt, at loose ends, swiftly becomes a member of the gang – even though Pete’s sour second-in-command, Bovver (Leo Gregory), is automatically opposed because Matt is a Yank. It is crystal clear that Bovver spells big trouble.
The GSE is committed to continual warfare with firms of other teams. When the GSE is not slugging it out in the streets, sometimes with lethal consequences, they are boozing it up in their favorite pub.
Wood is a sufficiently talented actor to be able to make persuasive the shattered and rootless Matt’s vulnerability to the Green Street Elite with its endless opportunities to express aggression and its strong sense of belonging. But he lacks the physicality to seem a credible brawler, to the detriment of the picture.
The strongest plus is director and co-writer Lexi Alexander’s ability to make understandable how these men become intoxicated by violence.
At the end of the day they’re just a pack of thugs, and the best that one can hope for them is that the old Mafia adage applies: “We only kill each other.”
The only emotion it ultimately evokes is one of relief that, after 106 minutes of men getting off on beating each other up, it is over.
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