Review Moves: AwayDays | Pat Holden | Carty, played by Nick Bell | Liverpool | 1980s | Football | hooliganism | non-descript | "The Pack" | Liam Boyle

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The Review - AT THE MOVIES with DAN CARRIER
Published:21 May 2009

Carty, played by Nick Bell, has yet another reflective moment on the banks of the Mersey in Awaydays

Footie flick scores too many own goals to be a real winner

AWAYDAYS
Directed by Pat Holden
Certificate 18

CARTY is a young man with no direction, finding his youthful energy a boring drag as he scrapes a living working in a non-descript office in Liverpool at the turn of the 1980s.
It transpires that things have not been great for Carty (Nick Bell) – he has recently lost his mother and has a kid sister he has to keep an eye out for.
We learn he has dropped out of art school, and that he has a longing to be part of a local gang called “The Pack”, who spend their weekends following a football team around the country not to enjoy the game but to get into scraps.
His life changes when he meets Pack elder Elvis (Liam Boyle) at a gig in a venue that looks suspiciously like The Cavern. Now he has a crew to belong to – but with that comes new problems, none more so than new chum Elvis’s disillusion with his own gang, and an (unsatisfactorily explored) suggestion that Elvis’s daydreams of escaping Liverpool for better times in New York and Berlin may have something to do with being in love with his friend.
This is a coming-of-age film which touches on a series of issues young men face and at times does so with humour and grace. But its wide aim means it more often than not fails to hit the targets it sets up.
While the film looks at a renaissance in Liverpool when their team were winning everything at home and in Europe, we are never told that this is a film about a crew of Liverpool fans. Instead we watch them at a tiny non-league-looking ground, being totally unconvincing football yobs.
In one scene they are with people in red scarves, the next they are decked out in blue and white. While it may seem like a minor gripe, these small observations continue throughout.
The set-piece hooligan fights have a strange sense of taking place on set. The firm travel to away matches yet get off on deserted railway platforms – the only other people seemingly in the town they have visited are other hooligans.
Clothes were a crucial feature of late-1970s hooligans – their moniker being “the Casuals”. Yet instead of going to a retro clothing shop and kitting the actors out in original Sergio Tacchini, La Coste and other such trend-setting labels, they wear an odd pastiche of identical windcheaters.
Other minor gripes which add to the overall idea that this is in places not quite baked through is the use of a tumbledown pier on the Mersey for all the more thoughtful scenes. It is as if the director has gone: right, we need our thug to look thoughtful, let’s put the sea in the background. This happens time and again.
Finally, we have seen these issues covered in The Football Factory. Awaydays doesn’t add much.

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