This Sporting Life

One of the reasons I first fell in love with the cinema was the fact that I absolutely hate all forms of sport. It always seemed to me that spending Saturday mornings in a dingy flea-pit watching 1950s B-movies re-runs was infinitely preferable to either chasing a pig's bladder around a muddy field or (worse still) watching someone else do it. Imagine the heaviness of my heart, therefore, when faced with this week's new releases, which offer a triple-bill of sporting action comprising boxing (Cinderella Man - much better than expected), American football (The Longest Yard - every bit as rubbish as expected) and English football (Green Street - worse than you could possibly imagine).

Green Street is an Anglo-American co-production, written and directed by a German, about a spunky Yank (Elijah Wood) who gets kicked out of Harvard and then comes to London to find his true identity as a hard nut West Ham fan. And yes, it's every bit as ghastly as that sounds. The fact that said Yank is played by Frodo is the least of this abominably stupid film's crimes against cinema, which range from horrible trans-Atlantic explanations of local colloquialisms ("Gor blimey mate, give us your bread and honey - which is rhyming slang for money") to a grotesque glorification of hooliganism which probably looks quaint and quirky to the Americans.

Remember that brilliant Bill Hicks routine about how silly news reports of English 'ruffians' sounded to the residents of East LA ("Oh no, the hooligans are loose! The hooligans are loose! Quick, catch them before they become scallywags!)? Well, Green Street just adds to the problem, giving our apple-pie eating brethren the mistaken impression that there is something noble and character-building about hitting somebody with a brick in a jolly pub in merrie England. The final punch up in Green Street actually plays like the battle at the end of Braveheart, packed with slo-mo shots of great human sacrifice and loyalty, played out to a grisly MOR ballad, and leaving our diminutive hero with a new sense of self-worth which allows him to go back to America and beat up his posh ivy-league colleagues in the toilets. Hooray!

Next page • "Green Street's bone-headed mentality would be offensive were the film not so risibly, pathetically laughable"