Not hard enough

With very few films set around football hooliganism having ever been made (The Firm (1988), ID (1995), The Football Factory (2004) and Green Street (2005) are all that leap to mind), there’s not much of a body of work to compare Cass (2008) to.

Maybe that’s a good thing, as Cass, at least, is a true story. Sadly, however, this is about the best thing I can say about it.

Now, I can’t pretend to have experienced anything like the life that the eponymous Cass Pennant has – and pretty happy about that I am too. If all the things portrayed in the film actually happened to him and his family and friends, why did the story not grip me? For a start, the screenplay seemed very flat, even though it was adapted for the screen by Pennant himself, in partnership with Jon S. Baird (who also directs and was on the production team for Green Street).

He could be forgiven for jazzing it up a little, but the script often fails to sparkle or ignite the emotion obviously intended. There are a couple of scenes in which this is not the case – when he’s trying to comfort his father following his mother’s funeral, and realizes that he doesn’t know how to have physical contact, even though he obviously loves him, is really quite touching. It sounds cliched, but is handled very well.

It’s not even that the casting or acting were particularly bad – they weren’t. Nonso Anozie handles the lead role very well – a considerable task as he really wasn’t given the tools to work with. If anything drags the performances down it’s the pedestrian nature of the screenplay. This surprises me more than a little, as the book is very well thought of.

Cinematically, it certainly lacked the budget to succeed. Again, things were competently handled, but didn’t shine. It may as well have been shot on a super 8 reel for all the clarity it had. I have heard tell that this was deliberate, and that it was meant to convey a ‘gritty’ realism to the story. Sorry, but it simply looked a bit crappy. The consistent splicing in of stock ‘hoolie’ footage didn’t do much for the pace of the film either, and one single splice of Thatcher telling the press how she was going to battle hooliganism would really have done, but it was overused and quickly became irritating.

Aside from blaming Thatcher (and, let’s face it, she was and is a nasty piece of work), Cass contains some interesting social commentary. It seems that if you grew up in London in the 1970s and were black, you got beaten up or fought back (this was, after all, how Cass got his start in footie violence). This is pretty much accepted as fact. What the movies don’t always show you is the black-on-black racism, as portrayed by Cass’s black cellmate threatening him with physical violence for not knowing his ‘roots’. These points were presented in a believable and genuinely interesting manner, it’s just a pity they couldn’t have held off making this for a year or so and tidied up the screenplay, as it would have made a belter of a movie. Sadly, I fear I will have to go and buy the book to learn his real story.

108 mins.