Cass

Excellent biopic and and great acting. The usual familiar British faces with your typical violence and swearing. Cass is played well and is a good portrayal of 1980s Britain. If you like football hooligan films you will like this.

This film was of a real interest to me as it was produced by the same producer as Green Street, and having watched it I feel more informed, if a little frustrated.

The film centres around the character of Cass Pennant, a real life hooligan and 80's icon for hooliganism. Adopted into a white family, in an age of racism and violence, Cass finds his natural environment in the place where you would have thought he would be the biggest victim.

The script is based on Cass Pennants book 'Cass', and you can't help but feel it was copied and pasted from novel to script. The main problem is that this could have been one of the best football thug films if they had managed to get decent actors. Not that they don't do a good job, its just not great. Nonso Anozie is pretty good as the main character Cass, its interesting to see a generally soft natured character flip out now and again in a hooligan film instead of the typical hot-headed cockney. The rest of the cast however don't support him very well, and it seems as though they are forcing the drama rather than acting in a biopic.

Overall though, its an interesting insight into a real character in hooliganism, how he ended up, and kept going back, in the hooligan 'business'. If you are looking for another rise of the foot-soldier or a football factory type film, then this may not be for you.

With The Football Factory still reverberating in the memory, it's difficult to get as excited about a film like Cass as one would like; a piece living in the still-recent shadow of such a film whilst calling on direct influence from the likes of 2005's Green Street as well as bits and pieces of an older crime film, albeit disconnected from hooliganism, in the form of De Palma's Carlito's Way. Indeed, Cass' director is a certain Jon Baird; a man who worked on Green Street as an associate producer - his film here formulating into a similar tale of a "white crow" and their consequent exposure to a world around them they are inherently alien to. This, before undergoing a gradual inception into it. It all smells suspiciously of said example's Elijah Wood character, an American getting lost amidst the sociological norms of a hooligan-dominated zone and having to undergo this process of initiation so as to get by. A similar framework of someone as much-an outcast to their surroundings getting involved, before realising the nature of one's ways and one's life, is told here, only over the space of about thirty years and not as engagingly.

The film follows that of true-to-life criminal-come-hooligan turned author Cass Pennant; a man whose tale here is as true as they tell us it is, and yet doesn't carry that naturalistic sense that it is someone's life actually progressing from one point to another. Told in glaringly episodic fashion, a fresh popular song peppering the soundtrack every time the era jumps forward, Nonso Anozie plays the titular lead: a man of Jamaican descent adopted at a young age by a white London couple in the 1960s, and brought up as their own in decent, friendly home-set surroundings. As a youngster, he is marginalised and ridiculed for his colour; a safe haven arriving in the form of a local public house practically run by the fans of West Ham United, whom welcome him in if it means he's a fan of the team and help him out when he runs into those racists outside of hours. This sense of unity is epitomised by the singing in unison those within carry out; football shirts and scarves in the club's colours reiterating this sense of being at one. In an attempt to instill an early sense of where we're at, we observe The Football Factory's own Tamer Hassan doing what the character of Billy Bright did in Nick Love's said 2004 film, when pub-set shenanigans give way to the intimidating of a young kid who thinks he can intermingle with those above his weight.

Cass is apprehensive of going to football to begin with; not even his father's reiteration that the stars of the day and certain World Cup winners will be there appears to convince him, but he rides it out and then discovers a taste for what lurks beneath the following of a football team. Thus that of what we see of Cass' life is launched, his descent through hooliganism and organised violence; a world in which the attraction of a footballing 'firm' facing off against another is more appealing than the match itself. West Ham's biggest rivals in this regard are Leeds United, not out of geography nor the fact they are both of an immensely skilled nature alá the Real Madrid-Barcelona ties, but because these two fight the hardest.

What transpires are several 'bits' and pieces of Pennant's life: his first feel of football violence; his going to prison; his meeting of a girl; his getting wind of a business venture, none of it much more than slightly interesting and all of it propped up with a lacklustre script seeing dialogue made up of insults and lots of four letter words predominantly coming from that of the males therein with meek moral out-linings accompanying spots of common sense exuded by the females. Director Baird strikes us as someone doing their utmost to make a good film, maturely; his veering off down a route to encompass a sub-plot inspired by Carlito's Way, as well as the fact Cass is later released from prison to the same sound of pomp and circumstance that saw Alex De Large enter prison in Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange, suggests the man has seen his fair share of films; enjoyed them and desperately wanted to make his own whilst pay homage, but there is no cumulative whole around which everything gels. Its politics may be in the right place but the film's overall feel as you both watch it and absorb it is that of unsmooth; as if it's fumbling around in the dark for the right buttons, sometimes finding them, but doing its utmost overall to do the right thing.

Sure Cass is about hooliganism and has enough of that to fit the bill, but this is good enough to be mainstream viewing.

We found it much better than we expected: good central performances and a great arc lift this from its genre to something better.

It really looks and sounds (the language is what is was, every second word is filth, but then it was) like the British East End 80s down to the council flat doors.

I can honestly recommend this a good well-made film about life in Britain in the early 80s, it is a little light on production and directing values, it is shot too simplistically, but the story is well delivered, it is probably not for your granny (unless she's a hard nut), but deserves a wider audience than just 20 year old males with a footie hard on.

As a true story it's never going to feel like a Hollywood blockbuster, but compared to something like The Krays I think it stacks up superbly. This film feels real and as a side point the story should be respected, racism was rife in football at that time so the 'achievement' of Cass is even more remarkable.

I guess I'm a bit biased as I've met the man, met his wife and met his son (who had an extra role in Green Street).

Summary is this; a good film on a really interesting life and even though the narrative is grim, enough in the film to entertain, definitely recommend.