The Match - A Review

By Damon Wise

Directed by, Mick Davis
Starring - Max Beesly, Laura Frazer, Tom Sizemore, Richard E. Grant
Opens Aug 6th, Cert 15, 96 mins.
2 Stars

An escape to victory for the Waking Ned generation.

There's something uniquely English about the fascination with failure. The Match -- set in Scotland, though this never once feels like a Scottish movie -- is yet another David and Goliath story, this time inviting us to feel sorry for a hicktown football team whose local pub is on the line if they don't win a vital game.

The feud goes back 100 years, when the town's founding fathers fell out over a woman, but after 99 defeats, the outcome seems depressingly inevitable. It falls to Wullie (Beasly) to motivate the team, but his attempts to galvanize the team spirit are foiled at every step by his Machiavellian rival (overplayed, to put it mildly, by Grant). Meanwhile, his childhood sweetheart is threatening to leave home, and his rocky relationship with his neurotic mother is plagued by unnecessary flashbacks to the day his brother fell to his death from a local beauty spot.

From here, it all becomes an impossibly predictable British romantic comedy, offering too much in the way of melancholy and barely enough laughs to fill a 30-second trailer. Yes, every under has it's day. But every top dog has it's day off, and this grey depressing Lock, Stock, Four Weddings And A Full Monty wannabe won't convince anyone otherwise.

Damon Wise