All in the Game

Just watched this on TV tonight...

Firstly, the entire cast put in a rock-solid performance, Marsden and Winstone were both outstanding, but the rest of the supporting characters also hit all the points The timing... right between the end of the Premier League season and the start of the world cup... I'm betting someone got a bonus in this months salary for that piece of scheduling.

The story, involving such an emotive subject, will make real fans uncomfortable... Winstone plays a character I felt like I could punch repeatedly whilst screaming "Stop killing my game!" into his face... but will also maybe baffle people who just don't "get" the idea that it's perfectly alright to paint tribal colours on your face and congregate in a big concrete bowl, chanting at the rites performed on a patch of grass below.

Both Winstone and Marsdens characters obviously love football with a passion... Marsden prepared to sacrifice all his money for that love, Winstone prepared to sacrifice his love for money... and both of them "doing it for their families". Tragedy on a Shakespearean scale.

Frankie is a premiership manager of a growing team aiming for a European place this season. His son Martin is a football agent and together they have just engineered the signing of exciting new talent Joel Lamone who at only 16 comes to the club in exchange for as little as £5k a week and a new house for his mother. However when Paul Sheldon, a non-executive director, spots an inconsistency in the charges paid to Martin on a previous transfer it sets the cat among the pigeons and makes Martin nervous. Meanwhile Frankie wants to continue pushing the next deal through to help pay for his big new house.

The world of football fills the tabloid headlines with tales of sexual exploits, criminal activity, corruptions and more. Just a glance at the headlines will show you that there is no end to the big money deals and personal stories that suggests that some of the young players cannot cope with going from earning nothing to earning more in a week than most people do in a year. The love of the game is so great in this country that even things like Dream Team and Footballer's Wives bring in the ratings and I had hoped that this film would rise above that level of tabloid material to be more of a serious look at the subject. Sadly in terms of debate and insight the film is as clever as a long ball to a lanky striker. If corruption within the game were this obvious and in your face even the clueless FA could uncover it. The material never aims higher than painting in broad strokes and as a result it is just noisy fare without a great deal of substance.

Ray Winstone responds in kind with a performance that is unconvincing, noisy and more suited to a "Mike Bassett" type of vehicle than a drama. Maybe if the story had been set in the lower divisions then his character would have been realistic but in the Premiership? Winstone is all shouting and swearing to the point where he seems to be stealing from his Sexy Beast co-star Kingsley. Dyer has too little to do for someone of his talent and everyone else generally has only broad caricatures to work with. Elba is the honest upstanding ex-player; Marsden is the besieged chairman and Hamilton does a reasonable job of quickly going from naïve schoolboy to overpaid sex pest! Overall this is an OK football film but not one with any depth or insight. Viewers who like their sporting dramas simple and soapy should enjoy it partly thanks to Winstone pounding through the film all energy and noise but anyone looking for an intelligent and well-delivered piece on money and corruption in sport can easily find something better than this to watch.

I suppose that out there there are characters who bear more than a passing resemblance to those on display here.I suppose the main,and only pleasure is in guessing who they might be based on.The trouble is that Winstone goes right over the ball.It is difficult to believe that however cunning he may be that he would survive for long in the Premiereship.His team seems to go from Euro hopefuls to relegation fighters in about 5 minutes.Whilst the fans might have a go at the board their anger would be vented first on the team and then on the manager.After all most boards survive a bad season but the manager does not.Whilst there is more than a grain of truth it is rather overdone.

This well worth a watch. I think we can all think of a couple of names Winstones character is based on! Especially the agent son... I like Ray Winstone but I found his performance in this a little bit OTT at times. Interesting to see Dyer in a more supporting understated role. I'm not sure whether this has been repeated since its original viewing. It's certainly worth another outing.7/10.

STAR RATING: ***** Saturday Night **** Friday Night *** Friday Morning ** Sunday Night * Monday Morning

Frankie (Ray Winstone) is an impassioned manager of a troubled football club near the bottom of the league. But things appear to brighten up when he signs up promising new talent Joel (Ike Hamilton) who'll score the goals to get them further up the table. But Frankie's agent son Martin (Danny Dyer) has undercut the lad, and when Joel finds out about this, the relationship between all three of them turns sour. Joel starts to become corrupted by his new life of instant fame and fortune, Martin's reputation gets smeared in the mud and Frankie clings on like a dog to a bone to the club that he's failing to manage. In the devious, money making machine modern football has become, everyone is devious and no-one can be trusted.

'Our national sport' (which it is), over the years, has certainly gone far from being something that was only reported on the back pages of the newspapers to something that is predominantly on the front of them, more for what the players do off the pitch than on it, with the 'celebrity' tag that a lot of footballers carry nowadays. But football itself has also hit the headlines, with players as young of 16 from very working class backgrounds suddenly getting paid a ridiculous amount of money that they are too young and poorly educated to know how to use properly, along with the fame that comes from representing a national team that they also can't cope with. That's not to mention the corruption, scandals and back-handers that go on behind the chair-room doors, which All in the Game aims to get under the skin of. And while it's an ambitious idea, sadly a poor script, with a weak narrative flow, stops it from making the impact it could have.

As for the performances, no one could accuse Winstone of putting anything less than his heart and soul into this, which is just as admirable when you consider how his career stateside was taking off with roles in films like King Arthur and The Departed, but the simple fact is his character is just not believable. No way would a manager this loud and obnoxious be managing a team at Premiership level. Support wise, Dyer does nothing wrong, but the poor script gives his character some weak dialogue and this rubs off on his performance. Hamilton is impressive as your typical young football star with a lot of talent but not a lot of brains, but it's a testament to how poor the script is that there's a scene where he's unpleasant to his mother, showing a dark side that success has brought out in him, and this scene is never explored any further. This is just one of many potential sub-plots that are started but the bad writing never bothers to round off.

This was an inspired idea that if it had a better story could have worked wonders. As it is, it manages to be more Half in the Game than All in the Game. **