Is all British football this awful

Rating: 5/10 (15 November 2016)

There must be something redeeming about British football, but I have yet to find it. Media representations, both factual and fictional, seem largely concerned with bad behavior by young (and not so young) males. (To be fair, male American football fans aren't a whole lot better, just less violent.} Elijah Wood portrays Matt, a young American student at Harvard who is falsely accused of drug-dealing and expelled. That plot gets lost early on, but it does get him to London, where he bunks with his sister (Claire Forlani, a Brit, herself playing an American), now married to a Brit. Her brother-in-law, Pete (Charlie Hunnam), a football hooligan, is also on the scene. He is delegated to help Matt adjust to life in London, an assignment Pete is initially not thrilled about. Events spiral downhill from there. Wood is well-cast as the straight arrow Harvard boy who (for whatever reason) takes the fall for his well-connected, politically ambitious, drug dealer roommate. He is thrust into the violent Hooligan culture of London and takes to it. Hunnam, who has been criticized for his accent, realizes that film is an international commodity, and English is the language of commercially successful films. Actors have to be understood everywhere, not just locally. Most of his mates don't get that, and it makes much of the dialogue problematic. Forlani is given little to do and does little with it. This could have been a brilliant film; Wood always has the potential to make his vehicles be so. But it does not achieve that goal, and British football is the culprit. It is hard to sympathize with anything which finds its inspiration in a sport typified by the unruly behavior of its advocates.