Would you Adam 'n' Eve it?

Rating: 1/10 (12 September 2005)

It's been a good long while since I saw a truly awful movie, but it turns out that I was due. There's little I can add to the (scathing) criticism of this film that's appeared elsewhere. What I would say however, is that even if you can ignore Charlie Hunnam's distractingly bad accent, and EVEN if you can accept that Frodo is really a thug underneath it all, the fundamental problem with Green Street (as it's known under its UK release) is that the script sucks. Really. Sucks very badly. I mean seriously, did the character Peter actually say 'we're gonna end it right now' at one point near the end? The film feels like every bad cliché from every bad 'life on the streets' movie ever made has been dropped into a blender. And what was with the soundtrack to the climactic fight scene? I was expecting it to break into Brothers In Arms.
People have made comparisons with both The Football Factory and Fight Club. The former is a poor comparator - Football Factory had its faults but the portrayal it gave of the motivations of the members of the Chelsea firm was far more convincing than the two-dimensional 'thug by numbers' characterization in Green Street. Ironically the comparison with Fight Club is better, if you can draw some kind of tenuous linkage between the journeys of discovery of Edward Burns' and Elijah Wood's characters. But don't expect any of the invention, wit or intelligence of Fight Club here - you'd be better off just blowing bubbles.