Awaydays (2008)

Critic Reviews

• Sam Bathe, Fan The Fire

  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.

• Edward Porter, Times [UK]

  Bell's wholehearted performance and the film's convincingly scuzzy atmosphere don't make up for the big hole in the script.

• Charlotte O'Sullivan, This is London

  There's no shortage of movies about Britain's mean streets and, for the most part, Awaydays runs with the pack.

• Allan Hunter, Daily Express

  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.

• Dave Calhoun, Time Out

  The film falls down in its effort to make credible the background stories of its well-performed lead characters.

• Ali Catterall, Film4

  A pretentious, grubbily voyeuristic paean to football hooliganism, kitted out with ubiquitous slo-mo violence, tactical post-punk hits and retro fashions.

• Kevin Maher, Times [UK]

  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.

• Andrew Pulver, Guardian [UK]

  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.

• Tim Robey, Daily Telegraph

  What's convincing here is the pervasive unhappiness - the movie really understands violence as a drug, a way out of a void.

• Matt Bochenski, Little White Lies

  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.

• Simon Reynolds, Digital Spy

  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.

• Charles Gant, Heat Magazine

  Call us old-fashioned, but we wouldn't have minded some characters to relate to, root for and care about.

• Tim Evans, Sky Movies

  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.

• Neil Smith, Total Film

  To its credit, Awaydays does not glamorise its hooligans the way The Football Factory and Green Street did.

• Michael Bonner, Uncut Magazine [UK]

  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.

• David Edwards, Daily Mirror [UK]

  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.

• Mark Adams, Sunday Mirror [UK]

  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.

• , Sun Online

  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.

Read all 18 critic reviews