Green Street Hooligans

Lexi Alexander built this British and American co-production out of her own past. She grew up in Mannheim, ran as a teenager with a hooligan group called the Mannheim City Boys, became a world champion in karate point fighting at 19, then did stunt work. She wrote the film with Josh Shelov and Dougie Brimson, who spent 18 years in the Royal Air Force and co-wrote Everywhere We Go, a 1996 book on hooligan culture. The Green Street Elite is not a real firm. It stands in for the Inter City Firm, the actual West Ham crew mainly active from the 1970s to the early 1990s. The brawls are staged as group formations, about who holds a line and who runs, not as duels, which lets the film sell violence as belonging for a long stretch before charging for it. In Britain it went out as Green Street; the Hooligans tag is American. Charlie Hunnam’s Cockney accent opposite Elijah Wood put him on lists of the worst accents in film history. A good fit if you knowingly accept a film that makes group violence attractive for most of its length and saves the bill for the close. Not for anyone thrown out of a scene by an unstable accent, since nearly every line the second lead speaks carries it.