Directed by:
Maria GieseScreenplay:
Werner ZeusselCinematography:
Gerry FisherComposer:
Anne DudleyCast:
Sean Bean, Emily Lloyd, Pete Postlethwaite, John McEnery, Ann Bell, Melanie Hill, Chris Walker, David Leland, Rita May, Rebecca Nichols, Sabine Oberhorner (more)VOD (1)
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The movie centers around the wasted opportunities of young footballer Jimmy Muir (Sean Bean). Muir works in a brewery and lives with his parents and younger brother in the hard-scrabble industrial city of Sheffield, England. He loves to play soccer, but he is arrogant, disrespectful, and frequently drunk, and he has never made much of his talents. While playing for a local pub's team, Jimmy is spotted by Ken Jackson (Pete Postlethwaite), who recruits him for a higher league. Meanwhile, Jimmy embarks on an affair with a young Irish woman named Annie Docherty (Emily Lloyd), and he gets her pregnant. Jimmy gets offered a tryout with a professional club, Sheffield United. But the night before his tryout, he beds a stripper and gets roaring drunk. The next day he is useless, and he blows his big chance to make something of himself. Annie, who badly wanted him to succeed to get them both a better life, then leaves him. Jimmy finally realizes that he must change if he is going to have any kind of a future. (Fabulous Films)
(more)Reviews (1)
One cliché after another. And clichés and maladies from both the genre of sports films and social dramas. Emotions do not come up and the sports aspect is just for the sake of appearance. The film works well only because of Sean Bean's role of a lifetime. It's a role of a lifetime not because of his performance (although, at the age of almost forty, playing an impertinent adolescent who's almost a generation younger without looking ridiculous is a truly admirable performance), but because of his personality. Bean won't die here, but it's all about getting on the roster of the Sheffield United team. Into a club that he in fact has been passionately supporting since childhood. And who wouldn´t like to make their dream of scoring a winning goal for his beloved club come true, at least on the screen, right? Bean really enjoys it, which can be seen pretty clearly and thanks to which he saves this movie, which otherwise might have been just an average film that is worth seeing only when it is raining and you have nothing else to do.
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