The Rise And Fall Of A White Collar Hooligan
The Rise And Fall Of A White Collar Hooligan DVD (Momentum)
Having been, as I’m sure many of you have, a victim of the so-called “victimless” crime, credit / debit card fraud, that lies at the heart of ‘The Rise And Fall Of A White Collar Hooligan’, I was both intrigued, and appalled, by the film. The former because you always sort of like to know how it’s done and the later, given that there’s enough weight behind the fraud to make a film about it, by the sheer scale of the criminal enterprise that’s been fuelled by card fraud. ‘…White Collar’ tells the story of Mike, an unemployed victim of recession desperately searching for work, who while baiting the police after a football match, bumps into an old hooligan friend, Eddie, who after hearing Mike’s troubles, offers him steady work as a driver. Accepting the job, Mike finds himself being slowly, but surely drawn into the criminal underworld, and the more he tells himself that no-one gets hurt and that the money’s good, the deeper he descends until he reaches the point of no escape, and finds himself at the end of road with nowhere and no-one to turn to. ‘The Rise And Fall…’ is an often brutal, unrelenting film about the corruption and degradation of the human spirit, via the vessel of it’s everyman, working class hero, Mike. Like so many football fans of a certain generation, Mike is a hooligan, revelling in the rivalry and violence that’s become part and parcel of the modern game, but he’s fundamentally honest, and it’s the gradual erosion of his honesty as he embraces his newly discovered criminal lifestyle that propels the film, and his gradual redemption as he slowly discovers that, contrary to popular opinion (and Gordon Gecko), greed isn’t good. Greed is a killer, and eventually, no matter how hard or fast they run, at catches up with everybody. Tightly scripted and expertly plotted with a wonderful twist in it’s tail that flips Mike’s life around in the last ten minutes, ‘The Rise And Fall…’ (although, it could be argued that the title would also work as ‘The Fall And Rise…’, given Mike’s fall from grace and eventual “salvation”) is a home-grown, no nonsense thriller that pounds it’s story home and shows the world that there’s still some gas left in the Gangster tank. Recommended… Tim Mass Movement
