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.
Comment
05/22/09
Awaydays (2009)
38
%
Tomatometer
How does the Tomatometer work 
Reviews Counted:24
Fresh:9
Rotten:15
Average Rating:4.9/10
Consensus: 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.
Genre: Dramas
Reviews for Awaydays
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.
05/22/09
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.
05/22/09
The film falls down in its effort to make credible the background stories of its well-performed lead characters.
05/22/09
A pretentious, grubbily voyeuristic paean to football hooliganism, kitted out with ubiquitous slo-mo violence, tactical post-punk hits and retro fashions.
05/22/09
Take all the late-70s miserablism you can stomach, mix with the usual blend of bleakness and punching, then serve lukewarm on a limp bed of can't-be-bothered.
05/22/09
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.
05/22/09
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.
05/22/09
Script, editing and some poorly staged fight sequences render this inchoate and almost unforgivably uninteresting.
05/22/09
Call us old-fashioned, but we wouldn’t have minded some characters to relate to, root for and care about.
05/22/09
Awaydays doesn't really buck the trend, though it does put a more interesting spin on it by trying to fuse the phenomenon to post-punk disaffection in Britain.
05/22/09
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.
05/22/09
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.
05/22/09
There’s no shortage of movies about Britain’s mean streets and, for the most part, Awaydays runs with the pack.
05/22/09
Awaydays is a wonderful example of nostalgie de la boue - the "yearning for the mud". The pic wallows in Mersey misery evoked by its music heroes.
05/21/09
Bell’s wholehearted performance and the film’s convincingly scuzzy atmosphere don’t make up for the big hole in the script.
05/28/09
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.
05/22/09
Its themes of friendship and rejection are handled with aching sincerity, but they cannot galvanise a drama too forgiving – and too much in awe – of knife-wielding yobs.
05/22/09
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.
05/22/09
What’s convincing here is the pervasive unhappiness – the movie really understands violence as a drug, a way out of a void.
05/22/09
RT On Current TV
What’s Hot On RT
Fresh Links
Featured
Best Sci-Fi This Decade 
Techland lists the best Sci-Fi films of this decade.
40 Worst Films of the 2000s
Moviefone takes a look back at the biggest stinkers of the past 10 years.
10 Questions For Zac Efron
The Me and Orson Welles star answers reader questions on TIME.com.
Best Decade Ever!
Hollywood.com's C. Robert Cargill offers his thoughts on what the best decade for film was.
Pee-Wee's Big Adventure
In the AV Club's "Scenic Routes," Mike D'Angelo reminisces about the Tim Burton film.
Promos
Follow RT on Twitter
Get the latest Tomatometer updates on upcoming movies!
IGN RSS Feeds