Are there any other movies like this???

The Firm

Also Rise of the Footsoldier has Football hooliganism for about ten minutes at the beginning. Future productions are Awaydays (read the book) and Green Street 2 is rumoured which will be por much like the first.

YOu have poor taste - Green Street is *beep*

I personally feel this movie is way more similar to movies like Donnie Brasco, where the cop can no longer tell the difference between his friends and the criminals he is tasked with arresting.

While my initial interest in this movie was due to it being about football hooliganism in 1970s/80s/90s Britain, when it was common for some of the fans to bring weapons ranging from wooden sticks to hatchets to the meets, after finally finding and watching it I gotta say that this movie is as much a period piece and social commentary as it is a football movie. It is one of those rather rare films that, despite actually being made in the mid 90s, is able to realistically depict the look and feel of the 80s, and the obsession with football present in those times.

As mentioned, while being about football and hooliganism, the movie is also very successful at illustrating other aspects of the two different cultures presented. In the beginning John is a career driven policeman with dreams of soon making sergeant, and later inspector. Also, I feel like at that point he still sees things in black and white , where the cops are always the good guys and the hooligans are always bad. After he joins the hooligan scene, he learns about things like confidence, friendship, and loyalty practically for the first time in his life. Ironically, while in the US police departments are usually a very close group shielding each other with a metaphorical "blue wall", in this movie the director/writer shows that it is one of John's hooligan friends that he can actually count on in the end, when Trevor and some other flee the scene.

While obviously every person can agree that John took things a bit too far in the end, and completely lost his mind, it is hard to say whether it was because of the lifestyle or because of the fact that he felt like he could never belong to the group that welcomed him as one of their mates, despite it all being initially based on the lies he told them.

All of the four cops agreed that they were having the time of their lives when being with the rest of the hooligans, and at the end they all ultimately agreed that it was not the Rock that was the problem, but the real criminals acting behind the scenes who were actually committing criminal acts that endangered real taxpayers. While it is not clearly shown in the movie, it was and is very uncommon for football hooligans to fight with regular folks who attend football games, and the most hardcore fans would usually sit/stand in specific parts of stadiums, where they would not interfere with other football fans. Ironically enough, it was then when the British police decided to suspend the investigation making the claims about police brutality go away.

Albeit briefly, this movie at the end also touches upon the wave of ultra-nationalism that swept across Britain in the 80s, due to the economic recession, Falkland War, and influx of immigrants, where every person yearned for an identity and a sense of belonging and acceptance into something larger than themselves.

While I certainly do not think this movie tries to glorify either one of the social cultures - especially not the skinhead neo-nazi groups, which it clearly condemns and uses to illustrate the main character's further slipping into psychosis - it is also efficient at showing that there were certainly positive aspects of the football hooliganism that a lot of males look for, in a similar fashion to the movies like the Fight Club, where the male embraces, instead of trying to hide and apologize for his primitive animalistic nature.