CLUBBED

by Mark'd Commode

Release Date: 16th January 2009

Director: Neil Thompson (Twenty8K)

Cast: Mel Raido, Colin Salmon, Shaun Parkes, Scot Williams, Maxine Peake, Ronnie Fox, Aicha McKenzie, Ellen Thomas, Ian Ralph, Nick Holder, Bronson Webb with Ian Virgo and Neil Morrissey

Writer: Geoff Thompson

Trailer: CLUBBED

Review by Matt Usher aka Joe Pesci II

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I thought this was going to be some dreary nonsense about a club in Manchester during the eighties and how it was really great with all that great music and great drugs and DJs dying in the toilets and stuff like that. I was wrong. It was some dreary nonsense about a club in Manchester in the eighties (looking weirdly like both 1977 and 2005) and how its bouncers led lives so soap-operatic that one wonders how they found time to go to work.

Our hero is played by Mel Raido (IN OUR NAME). We first see him seemingly leaving prison having spent a dozen or so years inside for killing someone, except this is simply a plot device which leads to a twist so pathetic that you can only congratulate the writer for stubbornly keeping it in despite it being unnecessary, illogical and dumb. (In other words, I didn’t see it coming.) Anyway we flashback and find him working in a factory, where he is low on the pecking order. He has two daughters, the apples of his eyes (even though he spends the first few minutes of the film imagining them drunkenly copulating) (not with each other – that would be weird), but he is estranged from their mother, despite writing poetry for her. (Thankfully we never hear any of it.) Mother is played by Maxine Peake (FUNNY COW), who must have either owed someone a favour or been really desperate for the work. She is the Official Leading British Actress of Her Generation these days, but in this she merely turns up every fifteen minutes or so to have a row with our hero about what a useless father he is, and that’s about it. She also glowers a bit. To be fair, her ex is pretty useless. As well as writing rubbish poetry he keeps getting beaten up in front of his kids by burly bad men. Then he turns tough and beats the burly bad men up, but he does that in front of the kids as well. Peake is very unhappy with him, and you can probably set your watch by their arguments. But she’s a good and loyal ex-wife, and although she does the right thing (i.e. rips up his poems and tells him he’ll never see the kids again – something which happens every time they see each other) she also stands by her man in his hour of direst need: she does the washing. Yes, the one action Maxine Peake performs in this film is to put a shirt in the wash. No wonder she went off to play Hamlet.

One man who will never play Hamlet is Mel Raido. He’s not bad in this film, but he starts off a bit shifty and finishes a bit shifty and he fails to take us along on his character’s journey. Not that it’s a particularly interesting journey. You see, he takes his girls to ballet class every week (that’s when he’s not getting beaten up by burly bad men) and then hangs around the gym. And then he joins in. In the gym – not the ballet classes – that would have been a different but possibly better film, like a Billy Elliot about a grown man who discovers his inner swan. No, instead he starts boxing.

The boxing club is run by poor old Colin Salmon (ALIEN vs PREDATOR). Salmon’s a very good actor, though it’s rare that he gets anything more than cameos (JUST FOR THE RECORD and DEVIL’S PLAYGROUND are personal favourites). Throughout we effectively watch events from the point of view of our hero (despite there being many events depicted which he can’t have known about). He looks up to Colin Salmon in a hero-worshipping / father-figure sort of way. So if our hero is impressed by Salmon, we’re expected to be impressed as well. And so we should! Because Colin Salmon isn’t just any old boxer, he’s a bouncer as well! And a head bouncer at that! (Not in the sense that he bounces heads so much as he’s in charge of all the bouncers who do bounce heads, though he’s happy to do so as the need arises). But most importantly he reads. But what matter does he read? The words of Sun-Tzu! Yes, he reads stuff like The Art of War! More than that, he acts it out! Even all the philosophical bits! Never has a doorman been so noble, so thoughtful and so violent simultaneously.

Meanwhile we meet two hench-bouncers: a cocky one who goes off the rails and works for the bad guy and drinks bleach and takes drugs and feels bad, and one who hates drug-dealers so much he duffs them up and donates their ill-gotten gains to the local church (actually he’s a pretty interesting character nicely played by Shaun Parkes – HUMAN TRAFFIC). Meanwhile the burly bloke who beats our hero up works for the local Evil Mr Big, who is trying to undermine our hero bouncers because of their ‘just say no’ drugs stance. I think at some point the film-makers realised they hadn’t really made Evil Mr Big evil enough, so he does a Quite Incredibly Bad Thing near the end, designed to have the audience baying for his blood. It doesn’t work, but you can see what they were trying to do. But it’s ludicrously over the top and shows that the filmmakers were trying to be shocking rather than following the logic of their own story.

Although more competent than a lot of similar rubbish, CLUBBED fails on most of the levels its meant to succeed on: the DVD emphasises the ‘cracking 80s soundtrack’ – I barely noticed it; the violence is commonplace; the story is dull, and the whole thing is charmless, tedious, silly and unbelievable. Its moral – that the little man can get ahead only by joining violent vigilantes and getting away with murder – is surely unintended?

WHAT HAVE I SEEN THAT ACTOR IN BEFORE?

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