Last night we watched Green Street Hooligans starring Frodo Baggins. What starts off being mildly interesting if a bit far-fetched spirals out of control into complete lunacy by the mid-way point making it a laugh-a-minute until the ending.

There’s not a lot of care shown to details here and everything’s just a bit over-the-top. For a sampling:

* The opening scene shows a fight between the West Ham and Tottenham firms which happens the night before Frodo arrives in London. That very day, Frodo goes with the lads to a West Ham football match. Which begs the question, did West Ham play two days running, or is there some other reason why Spurs hoolies (from Norf London) would make it to West Ham (far east London) and cause a ruckus? It would make far more sense if it had happened the week before, but that wouldn’t allow Frodo to arrive on the clean-up scene asking if there had been a terrorist attack. Subtle.

* For all the videotaping going on (ostensibly a comment on the state of British society) the cops are almost nowhere to be seen. When a mob of Man Ure hoolies is awaiting at the train station for Frodo’s crew, there’s no police presence until after the situation has boiled over. Um. The police may not be super-sleuths, but they are quite familiar with notorious football hooligans—hence the oft-referenced videotaping—so they wouldn’t just ignore a rowdy mob outside a train station. And the small fact that there is zero police presence after a firebomb is thrown through a pub window and a brawl ensues (which is the most ridiculous scene of the movie.) The place is burning, people are dying, yet the police don’t respond? But in an earlier scene, the Millwall hooligans have to flee a chip shop because the owner called the coppers after the hooligan leader assaulted another customer. Makes. No. Sense.

* Poor Claire Forlani, the only woman with any lines in the movie. The director must have told her “We’re looking for an actress who can cry. A lot.”

The movie has bigger faults than these. What chafes me is the distortion of hooliganism culture in Europe. I’ve been to several games in England, a game in Italy, I’ve watched games in bars in Spain, and went to one match in Brazil. The most dangerous situation by far was the Brazilian match. Can you get into trouble at a game? Sure. But it’s probably just as dangerous as trying to catch a USC game at the Coliseum. The vast majority of people get into and out of games without a sight of hooligans. Yet people in America seem to think I’m nuts for going to footie matches. Just like more than one European has asked me if I’ve ever been shot at living in the US. Distortion of reality? You be the judge.

But the overarching problem with Green Street is that it never attempts to tackle the question of hooliganism. Why do these guys feel compelled to go out and fight every weekend wearing their footballing colors? There’s some lame attempt at saying it has to do with keeping your friends’ backs and not backing down from a fight. Which might be a rationale, but not an explanation for why it happens in the first place.

A book like The Football Factory makes a strong case for English hooliganism being a social ill brought on by the wounded ego of a crumbling colonial empire. The hooligans in The Football Factory have dead-end jobs with no future prospects. They’re mad at the world because they’re constantly being shit on. The only thing they can have pride in is their football club, for which they’ll fight tooth and nail. Growing up in Green Bay, this makes a bit of sense to me.

But in Green Street it’s all just a choice. The former firm leader sees a kid die in a hooligan fight and quits hooliganism. He now has a wife and child. And a massive apartment. And he wears expensive suits. And he drives a Land Rover. This is the choice that the hooligans in the movie don’t see: quit your hooligan ways and live a life of marriage and conspicuous consumption. Except in reality this isn’t the choice. The Clash’s “Career Opportunities” comes to mind. The options for many young men are work on the dock or… work on the dock. Hence hooliganism. It doesn’t work the other way ’round, really.

There’s also the question of when this movie is supposed to be taking place. Anyone who knows anything about English footie should know that the formation of the Premier League changed the climate of hooliganism. The game went from being a blue-collar game to a white-collar game. The suits figured out there’s more money to be made by a dad bringing his wife and kids to the game than a bunch of drunken louts spoiling for a fight. Hooligans don’t pop into the club shop and buy a £70 replica jersey, you see. Hooliganism also got English clubs banned from European competition, and in the world of satellite television this means a lot of potential pay-per-view money down the tubes. So to say there’s been an all-out war on hooliganism isn’t much of an exaggeration. Clubs (like Chelski) have intentionally priced blue-collar folks (a small percentage of which were hooligans) out of the game.

Yet the movie wants to have it both ways. The hooligans in the movie don’t have any problem coming up with £50 to see the match each week. They never get caught. The police don’t know who they are anyway. This is a view of hooliganism in its hey-dey of the 70′s and 80′s, not its current state. From my understanding, today it takes a feat of administrative genius for two firms to meet in order to circumvent the cops, and clashes take place far from the stadium.

Don’t get me wrong, hooliganism does still exist and it’s no joke. It just doesn’t look anything like what’s presented in Green Street Hooligans.

Verdict: Big Thumbs Down