United We Fall

What do you call a sports movie with no sports? This peculiar, microbudget mock-doc hatchet job on Manchester United – a rough pastiche of last year’s celebratory documentary ‘Class of ‘92’ – doesn’t employ enough actors to field a football team, so it’s hardly surprising that actual on-pitch action is thin on the ground.

It’s the story of how five fictional Man U players – loosely based on Beckham, Scholes et al – scupper their chances of winning the treble through a combination of hubris, incompetence and an inability to keep their trousers zipped. The result is not unbearable: the deadpan performances are all fairly convincing – Ryan Pope is particularly good value as a Giggs-like northern fundamentalist – and there are just enough half-decent jokes to keep it ticking along.

But the script treads extremely dodgy ground with regards to race, religion and sexuality, and the reliance on talking-head interviews gets repetitive. Man City fans will presumably lap it up, but this is really just an 89-minute exercise in celebrity trolling.