An excellent and (surprise) honest movie

Rating: 10/10 (2 December 2006)

I'm no good at writing, so I'll keep this short. GSH is a great movie about English football (soccer, really) hooligans. Elijah Wood belies his pretty boy appearance by becoming an experienced fighter. Some great and very lifelike fighting scenes. That is a must for me. I hate old movies with bad fight choreography, because especially to me (or any other low class American kid) it looks amazingly fake. To the contrary, Green Street Hooligans' fight scenes could have been filmed live. That said, this movie is much more than a glorified boxing match. The "message" of this movie is far deeper than "violence is inherent to men", as one reviewer put it. Yes, it is, and yes, that's part of the movie. But the truth behind the glory is that, while violence can have amazing transformative powers, (Elijah Wood goes from being a shy, uncertain college kid to being a capable man), violence for it's own sake destroys everyone connected. We see the problems caused by both views of violence: that of suppressing it totally out of political correctness, and that of glorifying it out of pure barbarism. Elijah Wood doesn't even have the self confidence (or the mechanisms) to stand up for himself. He is part of the modern cultural machine, a reticent, nice guy, smart college boy. He caves when his roommate, part of the power structure, blames his own coke habit on Wood. Jeremy VanHolden (or Kennedy, same idea) controls his state through his daddy, a senator. On the other side, brawls between rival firms of hooligans kill a young boy and a grown man, tear apart families, and completely destroy a bar absolutely filled with foreign beer. Out of both extremes emerges Elijah Wood, not unscathed, but definitely stronger.