Bell’s wholehearted performance and the film’s convincingly scuzzy atmosphere don’t make up for the big hole in the script.
Comment
05/28/09
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.
Reviews for Awaydays
There’s no shortage of movies about Britain’s mean streets and, for the most part, Awaydays runs with the pack.
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
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
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
Top CriticTo 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
Top CriticWhat’s convincing here is the pervasive unhappiness – the movie really understands violence as a drug, a way out of a void.
05/22/09
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
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
Call us old-fashioned, but we wouldn’t have minded some characters to relate to, root for and care about.
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
To its credit, Awaydays does not glamorise its hooligans the way The Football Factory and Green Street did.
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
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
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.
05/22/09
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.
05/22/09
Script, editing and some poorly staged fight sequences render this inchoate and almost unforgivably uninteresting.
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
For an insight into an extinct and fascinating football culture, Awaydays will cut through you like one of The Pack’s sharpened stanley knives.
05/22/09
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