This drama purports to take us inside the world of West Ham football rowdies, but its plot is contrived.

| Jun 28, 2022

It swims and sinks in melodrama.

Full Review | Original Score: C | Oct 29, 2005

There's a good movie to be made about the violent world of British soccer, or football, as it's called on the other side of the pond. This isn't it.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Oct 21, 2005

Approaches the sociologically poetic sloganeering of the Smiths at Morrissey's most hooligan-lovestruck.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Oct 15, 2005

The script is a jumble of caricatures and cliches.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Oct 14, 2005

Soccer needs this movie like Georgia needed Deliverance.

| Oct 13, 2005

It's what you thought Fight Club was going to be, before it went in a whole other (and far more interesting) direction.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Oct 13, 2005

Pic amply demonstrates that Alexander -- director of Johnny Flynton, 2003 Oscar nominee for dramatic short -- has the chops to bring a fresh take to onscreen rough stuff.

Full Review | Oct 11, 2005

The movie forces you into primal alertness, its effectiveness enhanced by exceptional casting and escalating tension that plays on your emotions.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Sep 30, 2005

Unfortunately, the beatings are often more interesting than what's caused them.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Sep 30, 2005

Terrific because director Lexi Alexander, a German, brings an authentic feel to English hooliganism -- this is a brutal yet tremendously entertaining film -- and treats it very seriously.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Sep 23, 2005

This is a brutal, insightful look at a side of sports most Americans don't even know about.

Full Review | Sep 12, 2005

Director and co-writer Lexi Alexander choreographs the fight scenes with thrilling chaos, and the plot unfolds expertly if melodramatically.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Sep 10, 2005

Hooligans delivers two main points - that family is where you find it, and that violence can be as intoxicating, to some, as a drug.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Sep 9, 2005

Suggesting Hooligans is just too darned real for the entertainment industry to fathom would make a lot more sense if the movie weren't so mind-numbingly derivative.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Sep 8, 2005

The steady diet of brutal street fighting makes it all but impossible to connect with this picture, despite whatever visceral appeal it may offer.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Sep 8, 2005

A feature-length folly about the terrors and self-affirming joys of football (that is, soccer) hooliganism.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Sep 8, 2005

Alexander's techniques occasionally get a bit too fancy, but the movie has a kinetic energy and intelligence that score.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Sep 8, 2005

This is Fight Club without the irony or the metaphysical gaming.

Full Review | Original Score: 1.5/4 | Sep 8, 2005

The message is that violence is hard-wired into men, if only the connection is made.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Sep 8, 2005