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Awaydays (2008)

Director: Pat Holden

Time Out rating

Average user rating

23 reviews

Movie review

From Time Out London

The memory of ‘This is England’ hangs over this adaptation of Kevin Sampson’s novel ‘Awaydays’. Again, it’s a period story of a young man’s initiation into a gang of thugs – this time football hooligans in 1979 – who seek solidarity and identity through music and fashion. The slo-mo scenes of lads marching towards the camera to music, all of them oozing pride and brandishing Adidas raincoats and trainers, could be straight from Shane Meadows’s film, not least because Stephen Graham is back as an older, influential leader of the pack.

But while the group dynamics have a pleasing swagger to them and ‘Awaydays’ is more concerned with character than knuckle-headed hooligan films like ‘The Football Factory’, the film falls down in its effort to make credible the background stories of its well-performed lead characters, Carty (Nicky Bell) and Elvis (Liam Boyle), one a suburban boy looking for working-class thrills, the other an alienated romantic confused about his sexuality. It’s also hard to ignore the shoddy acting in some of the smaller roles and cinematography that is unforgivably murky.

Author: Dave Calhoun 2009-05-19 13:20:08

Time Out London Issue 2022, 21-27 May, 2009

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User reviews of this film

Rod said...

Posted on Oct 13 2009 16:36 This really is a truly awful film. Put Irvine Walsh and Danny Boyle on the case and you'll get some sort of idea how casuals worked in the 80's. Too much emphasis on adidas trainers and overplayed Joy Division. Furthermore, I found it impossible to buy into any of the characters. Don't do what I did by wasting a whole evening persevering with this garbage.

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speny said...

Posted on Oct 02 2009 23:13 just watch this and I not that happy. is it a fdootball hooligan film?
is it a love story?
is a film about the 80's music?

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Parker said...

Posted on Oct 02 2009 18:31 utter rubbish. a middle class fantasy about what its like to be a football hooligan. vanity film-making at its worse

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XBCF said...

Posted on Sep 28 2009 19:21 This movie stands head and shoulders above the genre and puts This is England into the shade. I can see why a southerm media centric view would prefer the latter (it has all the right signifiers, neo-nazi skins,, the falklands, jingoistic polemic over identity ) but awaydays captures an evolutionary moment in youth culture , the death of the bovver boy(as featured throughout This is England) and the emergence of the Cult with no name, a male driven, fashion and football obsessed culture that would later become quanitified down South as the Casual. This movement hasn't jumped on the Meadows bandwagon at all, it show quite implicitly why up north, skinheads were a thing of the past by 1980 let alone '82. A very well crafted adn put together movie tha looks as though it was in 1979 rather then being low budget. This is the kind of movie that in 2-3 years time will be classed as a classic cult movie by those who have slagged it... a bit like This is England, which so many people hated at the time but now strangely seem to hold up as one of the best British movies of all time,

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king said...

Posted on Sep 17 2009 13:45 Best footie film ever. This captures the moment for me better than any other. The clothes, the gesturing, the hair - this was as it was. I always thought the relationship between elvis and carty, One was educated who wanted into the thug scene, whilst the other had no option but to be in the thug scene, actually wanted something more.
Much better than 'this is england' which for me was all wrong.

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Scot said...

Posted on Sep 04 2009 19:38 it is on the torrent sites now...noticed it coincided with the films imdb rating going through the floor! very drab, very scouse, lots of better ways to spend an afternoon

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Penguin Lover said...

Posted on Aug 30 2009 11:47 Easy to criticise the budget. Gave it 3 stars, but after looking behind the story and watching it again - 5 STARS! The pro's greatly outweigh the cons, and anyone who like rough brit indie films simply have see it...

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T Belton said...

Posted on Jul 31 2009 22:51 i think the fact this film is NOWHERE on the bit torrent sites sums up how good it is.....not worth watching for free

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Jamie Fielding said...

Posted on Jun 18 2009 22:56 I was going to go and see this...seems its been pulled!

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stevie said...

Posted on Jun 16 2009 23:07 rubbish film

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Mike Draper said...

Posted on Jun 09 2009 10:59 Have read a few articles/ interviews on the film, very funny how the writer Kevin Sampson self proclaims the film to be the new Trainspotting, Control, This is England, Quadrophenia etc. How self important!? This is so far outside the class of those films. A turgid mess.

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Peter said...

Posted on Jun 02 2009 16:52 Rubbish. No wonder it flopped - first weekend reported by UK Film Council was a £39,000 gross off 46 screens. Must have spend £250-300,000 on release. Probably won't pass £100,000 box office (most of which is VAT and cinema's cut)

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Octavia said...

Posted on Jun 02 2009 13:15 but I do agree with Dave Calhoun that Stephen Graham shouldn't have been cast, precisely for the comparison

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Octavia said...

Posted on Jun 02 2009 13:12 I agree with Salford Red. The way that This is England commercially fetishises that culture is painful. AwayDays was written way before, by a genuine casuals pioneer, and as a film it has far more integrity. The fashion references etc. are more accurate than any other film has been able to achieve. The boys are brilliant too. My review at getyourocksoff[dot]blogspot[dot]com

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Salford Red said...

Posted on May 28 2009 15:47 This is england was a working class film for people who get their "youth culture" from sociology books. Kevin samson produced it himself so that a load of clueless middle class media types didnt try to turn it into a "relevent" statement about society. The haircuts and the clothes were ALL important to people involved. The Jackets alone mark it out as a far supperior document of the time/place/attitudes of a group of people who were way ahead of the rest of the country.

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