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"Director: Pat Holden Screenwriters: Kevin Sampson Starring: Nicky Bell, Liam Boyle, Stephen Graham (interview), Holliday Grainger, Oliver Lee Running time: 105 mins Certificate: 18 The subject of hooliganism has proved fertile ground for British filmmakers in recent times. The Football Factory had Danny Dyer geezering it up as a member of Chelsea&amp;#039;s Headhunters firm and Green Street miscast Elijah Wood as an American student drawn into match day brutality. While those two films tended to thrust chest-thumping machismo onto a pedestal (particularly the knuckle-dragging Factory), Pat Holden&amp;#039;s Awaydays casts a more critical eye over the acts of violence that have often dragged England&amp;#039;s number one sport into the gutter. Set in Liverpool in the late &amp;#039;70s, Awaydays finds teenager Carty (Bell) eager to run with &amp;#039;The Pack&amp;#039;, a group of young working class men who catch a train every week and attempt to beat opposition fans to a pulp. When he strikes up a friendship with Pack member Carty at an Echo &amp;amp; The Bunnymen gig, he&amp;#039;s pulled away from 9 to 5 drudgery and into a world of violence, drugs and fumbling sexual encounters. Exploring themes such as class, family and the bonds formed between men searching for a place to belong, Awaydays has been pitched as This Is England meets Control. That connection isn&amp;#039;t necessarily going to help the movie, because it hammers home how similar Awaydays is to those two superior Brit dramas. In Carty, there&amp;#039;s a directionless young man similar to England&amp;#039;s Shaun, while Elvis is Control&amp;#039;s tortured Joy Division rock star, here substituting Ian Curtis&amp;#039;s fight to keep his epilepsy in check with Elvis&amp;#039;s feelings of lust towards Carty. Up-and-coming actors Bell and Boyle establish a believable friendship, yet Kevin Sampson&amp;#039;s script never provides more than rough character sketches for the young leads, who struggle to grab hold of their on screen personas. They&amp;#039;re upstaged by Oliver Lee, who delivers a memorable turn as the repellent, Stanley knife-wielding thug Baby. Similar to his This Is England racist Combo, Stephen Graham&amp;#039;s John Godden leads a group of impressionable teens - on one hand he&amp;#039;s an adoptive father figure, on the other a violent bully. Graham may have built a career out of playing the same character, but he&amp;#039;s never anything less than excellent doing so. Awaydays impressively recreates a grim Merseyside of yesteryear on a shoestring budget, with a bristling energy that compliments football&amp;#039;s tribal culture. Director Holden admirably refuses to defend the actions of his hooligans, but he occasionally falls into a musical montage trap, soundtracking scenes to the likes of Joy Division and Ultravox in an effort to push emotional buttons. Awaydays is a reasonably well-crafted coming of age story and the best of the recent hooligan dramas. It would&amp;#039;ve been much more impressive, however, had it arrived before Control and This Is England.  &amp;gt; What do you think of the movie? Share your views "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.digitalspy.com/movies/review/a155324/awaydays/>