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This starts off feeling like more like a sequel to the original movie than the last one did,
I can certainly give it that compliment. It's set-up to be more thought-provoking, it's
shot more like a theatrical release but does it actually live up to those emotional overtones
of the first movie? Where the last movie's script felt half-assed,
this one felt like it had a bit of thought put into it before becoming half-assed. The
film chooses to focus on the consequences of football hooliganism for the first few
minutes but then regresses into glorifying it like in the last movie, which is sad because
the first movie was all about displaying the consequences of football violence and how
it hurt everyone and ruined lives, so if this movie maintained that message, it would feel
like the proper Green Street sequel that 2 wasn't. We even have our Matt Buckner audience-in
character in the form of Danny, who may have been a part of the GSE earlier on, but now,
it's as new to him as it is to us. Not to mention that he is the one saying what we
as the audience think. That is, of course, until about a few minutes in where he does
a full 180, thus alienating the audience once more.
The cast here? Weak, everyone's a little deadpan on the delivery. Scott Adkins may be a spectacular
martial artist and a menacing presence on-screen, but when he has to do the 'I'm emotional and
grieving for my dead brother' scenes, it's awkward to watch. Unlike the other movies,
he really is the only cast member here that manages to stand out. The worst one here would
be that bartender named Molly, who seems to be really bored with the entire production,
I can maybe see a direct-to-DVD Bloodrayne sequel in her future.
This is James Nunn's second directorial feature, the first being Tower Block starring Cook
from Skins. His work here is not Lexi Alexander level. The fights are more flashy, like in
the first major brawl where slo-mo is used to accentuate the technicality of the fights.
It's not bad, the fights are fun to watch but they lose that sense of realism and grittiness
that the original had. His use of split-screen though is pretty cool. It's used sparingly
and it does manage to enhance the film. My biggest problem with this movie, is that
about half an hour in, a magical leprechaun came in and switched the movies while I wasn't
looking, and instead of Danny in Green Street 3, I was watching Yuri Boyka in an Undisputed
sequel. The film starts like a Green Street movie , then it starts to become very confused
as to what it wants to be. It becomes less of the street-brawls laden-with football chants
and more like the underground, technical fighting of those direct-to-DVD Undisputed movies.
Why is football hooliganism so organised now? They have a tournament with rules and ***?
You must only have five combatants in your team. The rules and organisation make the
whole firm system seem somewhat meaningless. When you take something as spontaneous as
drunk football fans kicking the *** out of each other and you throw in rules and proper
fighting styles, you make it less fun to watch because it's no longer random hooliganism,
it's just organised underground fighting. Here's the thing, this movie relies on action
when it has nothing to offer in that field that can't already be found in any other movie
ever. Even the fights themselves don't really start until 56 f**king minutes in. The story
comes to a grinding halt, so everything positive I said about the first half an hour disappears
into the void. It's like the people making the film just gave up and threw in a sex scene
to try and distract the audience from the fact that the rest of the film was literally
going to be boring fights and training montages with little to no context behind them. Even
the whole 'avenging my brother business' is dropped fairly quickly for a long time. You
wanna know who the killer is? Millwall. Literally the entire firm. What a shock. We don't even
know who the villain is because the movie doesn't care. Why are Millwall always the
evil firm and why are they always evil to the point of being the sociopathic anti-christs
of football? Why not just make it another team for once. We don't even know who's running
their firm. It doesn't matter. There's no real story here, the story ends about half-an-hour
in but the movie slowly drags itself towards the 90 minute mark.
The first movie was a masterpiece. The second was a mis-guided, mostly awful attempt to
try and expand on the original. This was a joyless, miserable chore. The film starts
on the right foot, but then it sinks into a 90 minute slog that JUST.WON'T.F**KING END.
The fights may be fun to watch, but there are so little of them and the characters are
such nobodies that it's all just so boring. Green Street 3: Never Back Down, which is
unrelated to that other movie called Never Back Down, is just a boring pile of ***.