Green Street

Matt Bruckner (Elijah Wood), a prize-winning Harvard student journalist with a promising future ahead of him, is caught with cocaine in his locker. It doesn't belong to him, but seeing that his roommate is a Boston Brahmin senator's son type, he has little option but to be the fall guy.

Expelled, Matt packs up his stuff and heads for London, where his sister Shannon (Claire Forlani) lives with her husband Steve (Marc Warren) and young family - their dad, himself a globetrotting journalist, has a bad habit of being absent at crucial moments.

Steve has planned a night out with Shannon and doesn't want Matt in the way. By chance, his younger brother Pete (Charlie Hunnam) shows up and gets assigned to keep Matt occupied.

Thing is it's Saturday and Pete, the "head boy" of the "Green Street Elite" crew of football hooligans doesn't exactly want this hopeless Yank getting in the way.

One thing leads to another and Matt winds up on the terraces. The match itself passes peacefully - other than Pete's right-hand Bovver (Leo Gregory) mounting a daring solo raid into opposition territory - with the real action being planned for later.

Matt is sent away but gets jumped by some of the rival crew before Pete and company show up and a full-scale battle erupts, during which Matt proves his mettle, standing his ground and giving (almost) as good as he gets.

The next morning, back at Pete's, Matt is strangely exhilarated by the whole experience. Over the coming weeks he spends more and more time with Pete and the crew, winning their trust and respect after a spot of quick thinking affords the GSE the chance to score big against a rival firm.

Only Bovver, apparently recognising a rival for Pete's affections in a not-really-brought-out-but-definitely-there homosexual subtext, remains unconvinced.

Then, just as matters with the hated Millwall crew are coming to a head - Bovver discovers Matt's journalistic background, something that is in direct contravention to the rules of their Fight Club...

Seeing as this is a football film, perhaps a goals for/against tally would be the best way to approach things. After 90 minutes and extra time the score sheet reads even, which is a fairly good result seeing as we've got a first time German lady captaining the team and a potentially out-of-place American import up front.

Director Lexi Alexander manages to give events the right degree of hyper-real attraction, or realist repulsion, as circumstances dictate, while the involvement of co-screenwriter Dougie Brimson - author of various books on football and other laddish subjects - ensures the portrait of the crew feels reasonably true-to-life in acknowledging, for instance, the embourgeoisement of the sport by presenting its characters as ordinary middle-class types... until Saturday comes.

Against this, however, it's never quite explained how they also manage to hold down white-collar jobs when coming in regularly on Mondays, visibly bloodied and bruised. Moreover, the point can also be criticised as less than original, having been made far more forcefully by Alan Clarke all those years ago in his typically uncompromising The Firm.

Green Street also emerges as somewhat whitewashed in a literal sense. Despite GSE being an all-white firm, you never hear racist epithets, even when some black members of a rival crew are being taunted - the list of real-life crews mentioned within the film also tellingly omits the notorious Chelsea Headhunters, perhaps on account of their links to the neo-Nazi Combat 18.

Still, it's better than you might expect. You'd never have known Frodo had it in him...