Review No.157: The Rise and Fall of a White Collar Hooligan

In my last post about 388 Arletta Avenue I talked about how the poster was fairly deceiving and I feel to an extent that is also true of the promotional material surrounding our next film The Rise and Fall of a White Collar Hooligan. Looking at the poster it seems that  film will be all about a football hooliganism, in the same vain as The Football Factory or Green Street, but instead it's a bit more than that dealing with credit card fraud and unemployment. Sure Paul Tanter's film does have as its leading man, in Nick Nevern's Mike, a guy who likes to get trashed and then incite violence at football matches but he's also someone who is constantly on the lookout for a job. It seems that Tanter wants to make a commentary on how so many people are falling into a life of crime as the early part of the film sees Mike desperate for work but him being a bit of a bum and all he instead agrees to help his old schoolmate Eddie out with a bit of business. As Mike has to drop off and pick up suspicious packages for Eddie he suspects that its drugs however when he opens up one of the boxes to find various bits of machinery he doesn't know what to think. After Mike proves himself as a reliable ally Eddie lets him in on their secret namely that he and a bunch of geeks are running a scam to clone people's debit and credit cards before using the clones to withdraw money. As Mike sees this as a victimless crime he is driven into an underworld filled with drugs, champagnes and various blonde prostitutes obviously he loses his girlfriend but at least he still has his friends around. The gang are eventually rumbled in France but it is Mike, who has gone to a football game, who ends up being arrested though after he doesn't grass anyone up he is welcomed into the inner circle of the gang by the kingpin of the group played by former Bill star Billy Murray. After this more gun battles, fighting and double-crossing goes on before a couple of not-as-clever-as-they-think-they-are endings take place.

It seems that Tanter is most proud of the scenes of hooliganism in his film as they feature heavily in the poster and also feature heavily in the opening as Mike gets extremely poetic over his love for fighting after a football game. I think, in the way that all of this year's British crime films have done, TRAFOAWCH wants to emulate the early work of Guy Ritchie before he struck gold with Sherlock Holmes. That's why actor Nick Nevern speaks very quickly and why the early scenes are meant to be comical as the character interviews for various jobs that you could never imagine him doing such as working at a women's clothes shop or in a nursery. I feel the scenes inside the credit card fraud operation as well were heavily lifted from scenes of the introduction of the various scams carried off in the Lock Stock/Snatch world especially when Eddie introduces Mike to the main concepts of their operation. I feel the meshing of the white collar crime and football hooliganism also doesn't really work apart from perhaps in the title while the camera work isn't as impressive as the director would like you to think. The ending of this incredibly brief film, it's under eighty minutes long, seems fairly rushed as if Tranter and company ran out of money before the story got told in the way they wanted it to. On the upside the short run time didn't mean I completely loss the will to live before it finished while Billy Murray has made a career out of playing dodgy small-time gangster types and makes the best of a bad lot in this film but those are only minor praises. There's not much to like here the acting, the scripting and the cinematography all feel old and tired or just rubbish while the ending comes off as fairly smug rather than anywhere near satisfying.

Verdict: Only Billy Murray's performance and the fact that this film is short saves Tranter's project from being utter rubbish having said that I can only feasibly give this one a 2/10