Average Rating: 4.9/10
Reviews Counted: 27
Fresh: 9 | Rotten: 18
Awaydays is an overwrought coming-of-age drama that romanticizes the violence of 1970s street culture in Liverpool and neglects the requisites of a good script.
Release Date: Mar 1, 2009 Wide
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Average Rating: 2.8/5
User Ratings: 653
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A young man makes some new and dangerous friends in this kitchen-sink drama set in Northern England in 1979. 19-year-old Carty (Nicky Bell) lives with his father (Ged McKenna) and younger sister Molly (Holliday Grainger) and has a good job working for his uncle Bob (Ian Puleston-Davies). Despite his loving family and promising future, Carty is fascinated with "the Pack," a gang of football supporters led by John (Stephen Graham) who are known in the neighborhood for their drinking and reckless
Mar 1, 2009 Wide
Optimum Releasing
All Critics (29) | Fresh (9) | Rotten (19) | DVD (1)
Awaydays comes close to being lumped in with every other British indie but the excellent production quality pull it through and director Pat Holden is left with another promising, if flawed, adventure.
Bell's wholehearted performance and the film's convincingly scuzzy atmosphere don't make up for the big hole in the script.
There's no shortage of movies about Britain's mean streets and, for the most part, Awaydays runs with the pack.
A meagre budget and a lack of clear-cut character motivations blunts the impact of what might have been a powerful Mean Streets-style study of male friendship.
The film falls down in its effort to make credible the background stories of its well-performed lead characters.
A pretentious, grubbily voyeuristic paean to football hooliganism, kitted out with ubiquitous slo-mo violence, tactical post-punk hits and retro fashions.
All around him the movie drips with atmosphere. The evocative sense of place is overwhelming, and perhaps the real star. Birkenhead in 1979 may not have been like this. But it is now.
To these figures, Sampson applies an almost hysterical level of romanticisation, and it sort of works - especially when all the impossibly yearning post-punk music on the soundtrack really gets going.
What's convincing here is the pervasive unhappiness - the movie really understands violence as a drug, a way out of a void.
Awaydays is a ham-fisted coming-of-age drama that fails to say anything interesting about male relationships, violence, the 1970s or the peculiar northern soul of Liverpool.
Awaydays is a reasonably well-crafted coming of age story and the best of the recent hooligan dramas. It would've been much more impressive, however, had it arrived before Control and This Is England.
Call us old-fashioned, but we wouldn't have minded some characters to relate to, root for and care about.
Lacking the empathy brought to this sort of subject by Shane Meadows, this is a one-way ticket that hits the dramatic buffers all too soon.
To its credit, Awaydays does not glamorise its hooligans the way The Football Factory and Green Street did.
To the music fans, it's watching Echo & The Bunnymen gigs at nightclubs; to The Pack, Awaydays contingent of football hooligans, it's fighting in car parks.
Combining awayday punch-ups with bedsit brooding, the tortured relationship between the lads is generally lifeless. Things aren't helped by the film's sheer gloom, as if a layer of dust and grime lies over the camera lens. Missable.
The film tries to blend Seventies music, fashion and a grim backdrop, but at heart it's a nasty and limp story told better by other movies.
Full of junkies, sordid sex and ultra-violence, it paints Seventies Liverpool as a vicious place to live. But somehow the gritty "realism" isn't believable. Perhaps it's the rambling plot or the shallow characterisation.
A really badly made film in many respects and the zero budget is glaringly obvious right from the start. Of course a low budget doesn't make a bad film and can often go in the film's favour, helping to give a film a raw, gritty and more credible feel for example. But good direction doesn't cost anything and here they
May 25, 2009Super Reviewer
Hugely dissapointed with this...what the hell it thought it was supposed to be I dont know. There is no comparrison between books and the film adaptation but this one was even worse....I have absolutely no problems with people being gay but this film wasnt s0 sure. I know it was set in 1979 but is it a love story? Is
September 20, 2009
Super Reviewer
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