Dangerous Mind of a Hooligan (2014) Directed by Greg Hall

Here we yet again have a very typical British crime flick, that's trying to be as tough and violent as possible but basically has no idea how to effectively do this.

I keep saying this but raw violence doesn't work when everything else about your movie isn't feeling engaging and 'real' enough. The situations and characters in this movie never feel like real ones and the movie is actually filled with a whole bunch of clichés and unlikely story developments, that all help to turn the movie into a far from realistic one.

Still the foremost reason why the movie doesn't work out too well is because of its characters. Again we are following a whole bunch of lowlife criminals around, who are doing some truly bad stuff throughout the movie, yet it still expects you to feel involved with them and care about their faith. This of course can work out, as long as the characters are some well developed ones, with some redeeming qualities about them. Well, the movie tries, I have to give them that but the problem still remains that none of the characters get developed properly enough, which is really due to the way of storytelling of the movie.

Thing about the storytelling of the movie is that it's constantly featuring flashbacks in it. However, too often, these flashbacks don't add anything at all to the story. It makes the movie needlessly messy instead and it's especially annoying how about halfway through the movie suddenly decided to flesh some of its characters out through these flashbacks. It doesn't quite work like that and it's all too little too late really. Besides, it's also weird how the movie uses flashbacks for characters who have already died and no longer play a part in the story.

Guess that it's fair to say that this is a movie reminiscent of a Quentin Tarantino crime movie, in the way how its constructed and getting told like. It's not quite a wannabe or ripoff but there are enough elements and similarities there for it to be still obvious enough. Elements such as dialog, certain characters and the violence itself. But well, it's obvious that director/writer Greg Hall isn't Quentin Tarantino though. Especially the dialog is bad and too often goes on for far too long, without adding anything at all to the movie.

Also, the title- and especially the cover of the movie barely have anything to do with the actual movie at all. It's not a complaint about the actual movie itself of course but it's still annoying to see how some low-budget movies keep trying to trick people into buying their movies with false advertisements, that create false expectations. "Dangerous Mind of a Hooligan"? Ehh, well one character is a former hooligan, which totally isn't relevant for the movie at all by the way and he also hardly is the toughest or most dangerous character of the movie. He's actually one of the nicer guys throughout the entire movie, that's about a group of bank-robbers, hiding from the police. So no, no hooligan fights or anything else along those lines, apart from one short flashback.

It's not quite as bad or annoying as most of the other cheap, modern, British crime movies that I have seen but it's a still far from great- or an even just good enough, movie.

5/10

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