Green Street Hooligans

**1/2 – I’d like to say that “Green Street Hooligans” was a thought-provoking, insightful and detailed dramatization of the seedy underworld of English football ‘firms’ – the groups of diehard fans, often referred to as hooligans, who fight and kill each other over a silly and unbelievably dull sport. I’d like to say that, but unfortunately I can’t because it was actually just a randomly strung together sequence of brawls between West Ham and Millwall supporters interrupted by the occasional whinge from Elijah Wood or the girl who played T.S.’s girlfriend in “Mallrats”. This is one of those movies in which actors might partake if they are trying to distance themselves from a role that has defined their career. That’s exactly what Frodo seems to be trying to do here by being in a movie full of tough Cockney rhyming slang spewing roughnecks and not wearing goofy-looking prosthetic feet or smoking pipe-weed with a queer wizard and a bunch of nancyboy hobbits and elves. It kind of backfired, though, seeing as throughout the first half of the movie he played his character pretty much as I imagine Frodo would if he was a real person, and then spends most of the rest of the film getting the crap kicked out of him. I kept expecting to hear Samwise Gamgee yell out “Mister Frodo!” from the background, so the likely attempt at distance from his famous portrayal wasn’t particularly successful. Still – and maybe this is the vodka talking – it was a fairly entertaining movie. It was kind of trite and formulaic, but I can accept more of that from an English movie than an American one because the accents are cooler and they didn’t elect Bush.