Green Street Hooligans

From director Lexi Alexander, reportedly a former karate champion who got into moviemaking through stunt work, Green Street Hooligans is a movie about young sports fans beating the tar out of each other ad nauseam. For those who believe that American football is for Nancies, it should do nicely. Upon unfair expulsion from Harvard, the fresh-faced Matt (Elijah Wood, Frodo no longer, thank you very much) crosses the pond to London to drop in on his estranged sister and take up with the gang of soccer hooligans into which she reluctantly married. If Matt’s initiation comes too easily, it’s apparently because there’s brawling to do and no time to waste. From here it’s sequences of cyclical vengeance, indiscriminately accelerated for that harrowing Saving Private Ryan effect or slowed down to register the bloodied erotics of boys being boys and wearing Tommy Hilfiger. OK, maybe the product placement isn’t that conspicuous, but the fights become so numbing and routine that the eye wanders. And it’s often difficult to understand the dialogue, though rarely necessary. At least the movie doesn’t try to psychoanalyze its characters. At all.