Hooligans

Rating: Null/10 (10 April 2009)

The kind of film you'd cross the street to avoid, this absolutely dreadful waste of time is filled to the brim with all the standard clichés of the football hooligan film.
As an added bonus, this one has a cast of fake Cockneys putting on terrible accents. In fact, the second lead Charlie Van Dyke - I mean Hunnam's accent is so awful it was a shock to learn he's an Englishman! Coming across like an Australian actor struggling with a South African accent, it's honestly worse than the Cockney accents in Timothy Hines' worst film ever made The War of the Worlds. At one point I swear I saw him look at the camera and sing "Maury Pappins, stip in tahm!" If you're going to make a film about Cockney hooligans you'd better make damned sure your actors can convince with the accents, otherwise the audience will be left in hysterics as I was. To me it's as fatal a flaw as having Count Dracula wear a pretty pink dress and it's beyond me how such a performance was even considered suitable.
Aside from the accents the film adheres strictly to the tired old rules of the sub-genre, offering only an American in the way of something fresh - and that fails, obviously. The only thing about the film that isn't entirely predictable is the reprehensible way it seeks to glamorise these thugs - just watch Hunnam's final moments - apparently seeing organised violence at sporting events as some kind of noble warrior tradition.