GB / US
2005
1hr 49mins
Dir: Lexi Alexander
Starring: Elijah Wood and Leo Gregory
A wrongly expelled Harvard graduate joins the West Ham United soccer firm
There are plenty of railway scenes in this football film, centred on drugs and hooliganism, but the continuity leaves as much to be desired as the dodgy story lines. The opening scenes at ‘Bank’ station on the Underground were in fact shot at East Finchley (though, curiously, a street level exit for Bank is also seen in this sequence) and there are some glimpses of 1995-built Northern Line tube stock, and some scenes filmed onboard. There is also a shot of Elijah Wood arriving at London Paddington and a Class 332 ‘Heathrow Express’ EMU is in the background. On the way to a match in Manchester, some of the gang meet in the car park next to London King’s Cross station and there are Class 91s, HST’s, a WAGN purple-liveried Class 317 EMU, a Class 365 EMU and a Class 67 diesel all visible in the background, but then it all goes a bit wrong. The gang are then back at Paddington for their ‘Manchester’ train and there are brief glimpses of HST’s, a Class 180 DMU and another Class 332 Hex EMU. On the way up north, the gang are onboard an HST on the Great Western main line and in one shot, a pair of Class 166 ‘Turbo’ DMUs in Thames Trains livery pass by the windows of the train. There is a very distant view of a train passing through the English countryside, which looks like it may be a pair of Silverlink-liveried Class 321 EMUs, and when the hooligans pull the communication cord and alight at ‘Macclesfield’, it is in fact Westbury! Look carefully and you can just make out a Hanson-liveried JHA aggregates hopper wagon behind the entrance building. Even worse, is that the fight which follows is set outside ‘Manchester’ station (no one particular station is specified), though in reality it is the rarely viewed entrance to Fenchurch Street. This is a pleasant surprise, but it hardly makes up for the extremely poor mish-mash of seemingly random shots.