Your not singing anymore...on account of those head injuries

Rating: 3/10 (17 September 2005)

No, not a biopic of Sidney Greenstreet but a film about football hooligans though having watched it you might find yourself a little bitter about the fact that the portly British actor doesn't feature.
Any discussion of Green Street has to centre on Elija Wood, the stunt cast lead, because his inclusion tells you two very important things about how the Film Industry works. First funding: Watching this thing hit you for 90 minutes like a Millwall Fan's bloody fist, you can imagine a conversation between the production company and the backers in which the not especially decent script was bolstered by the surprise attachment of Frodo Baggins. "We've got the star of Lord of the Rings interested!" they cried. From that moment the cash was in the bag but didn't someone stop to wonder whether or not the gentle, quasi-pubescent actor was the right choice for a film about English football violence? Someone almost certainly did but without Wood the script was buried so they kept those reservations to themselves. Secondly Star Vanity - Wood is probably the only person, bar the director who's a German Kick-boxing Champion (no, seriously) and thus only a fraction less aware of British football culture than old Elija, who can imagine himself as a Havard Student turned West Ham Supporting hardnut. "I need to shed my little boy lost image" he'll have told himself and so Green Street must have seemed like the perfect project to do it. The trouble is Wood is ludicrous as the American student, a near-graduate of the most prestigious University in the world, who decides that beating up Manchester United supporters with West Ham fans is the education he so badly needs. Several things strike you about this problem, one that undermines the entire story and pushes the whole thing toward low-comedy. Firstly Wood is a journalism student, albeit one with the poorest critical faculty in the world. Does he question the violent subculture into which he is thrust? Not at all - instead he's hooked after one chat in the pub with Pete, his mockney guide and thereafter loses any common sense he might have had, practically falling over himself to get stuck in to the latest beating. Even a hack working for the Sun, not journalists known for their brains, in fact some have barely got a G.C.S.E in English, would be brandishing this lot scum and calling for them to strung up. Wood however can't get enough of it which suggests that a career in the purview of analytical thought and the careful dissemination of facts may not be one to which he is well suited.
Believe it or not this is not the worst of Green Street's problems. Having paid scant attention to Wood's motives for joining the 'GSE' (its the lack of a Father figure... or something), it then goes on to unquestionably embrace the practise of making blood pies from people's faces as a perfectly legitimate form of camaraderie between men - blood brothers using the weekly scrap as the ultimate expression of their intractable bond. Now you and I might say, hang on a minute, they're beating people to death because these meat headed stroke merchants have a chemical imbalance in the brain, low intelligence and world view slightly less sophisticated than the Daily Mail editorial but for every scene that starts to criticise and then pulls back from doing so as if the director was afraid the film would turn on him and start beating his head against a table, there are many more in which the 'Blood Brothers' angle is promoted and repeated, the worst being the ridiculous climax in which a giant fight is set to a horrendous song, the lyrics of which talk about bonds and family; this all being edited to shots of men getting the living excrement beaten out of them. Claire Forlani improbably shows up in this scene, driving to the sight of a mini-riot with her baby to find Wood - a moment that perfectly captures the improbable nature of the entire enterprise. So that's Green Street kids - bloody nonsense but it would be rude to go without mentioning Pete, the leader of the West End "firm". Here's another bit of funny casting which has you scratching the head. The actor in question can't do a Cockney accent any more then I can and after you've heard him roll through the clichés "Yaw 'aving a bubble mate", "I'm feelin' a bit Terrence Trent D'arby" etc..., you have to ask yourself, were there no REAL cockney actors available? It was filmed in London for God's sake! Why hire a stage school boy from the Shires? In a movie where people can believe Wood was the inspiration for the Karate Kid despite the fact he'd have been about 3 months old when it came out, its par for the course. Everyone involved should be sent off...permanently.