Decent movie recommended with a slight wince (some spoilers)

Rating: 6/10 (15 February 2007)

The movie is engrossing. The sort of brotherhood portrayed here is appealing. People's passion for the football game, and love for hatred and violence, are well captured. Charlie Hunnan did a great job playing a lovable hooligan. Most other actors are only OK, though. Claire Forlani is yummy, but she was once in a while caught over-acting a bit in the movie. Elijah Wood... well, pretty much displaying the same sort of innocence we have come to get overly used to with him from Lord of the Rings... and his many other movies.
It's overall a decent movie. I always have a particular fondness for movies depicting the working-class life in Britain. The endless drinking in pub, the biting cynicism, the undying attitude to claim supremacy on every occasion, the unforgiving teasing of the losers, and the sheer compulsiveness to finish every sentence with the word "mate." All these fascinate me to no end. And I am glad that they are in good supply in the movie.
But what the movie does not offer is insights, not even those about hooliganism. Things are taken as given -- characters fight and verbally abuse one another for no other reason than that they are hooligans in the movie and that's what hooligans are supposed to do. To be fair, the movie never pretends that its purpose is to explore "why." But the frequency and audacity with which the movie asks us to also take things as given made me wince.
Who would expect an aspiring journalist (not least of all a son of a supposedly famous journalist) is so timid and afraid of power that he does not even try to fight a wrongful accusation? The head of a rival gang all of a sudden (after just a few instigating words) decided to take revenge for an accident that happened 10 years before? And after he almost killed a person, there's no police arrest and he's free to fight another day and kill another man?
But again, since the movie is never meant to provoke thoughts, we might as well enjoy watching it without doing much thinking.