for this week’s TRIBUNE : ‘Kicks’ [6/10]

Published on: June 4th, 2010

Kicks
Director: Lindy Heymann

THE latest in the long line of movies exploring the darker side of fandom, football-themed Kicks works such quiet wonders on a very limited budget that it’s a real shame when script deficiencies nearly derail the whole show in the final act – think Fulham’s gallant last-gasp failure in the Europa League.
   Third and last in the ‘Digital Departures’ project – whereby DV projects were given £250,000 as part of Liverpool’s 2008 tenure as European Capital of Culture – this notably good-looking tale of hormonally-fuelled obsession won’t make anything like the worldwide impact of the first, Terence Davies’ magisterial cine-essay Of Time and the City. But nor has it suffered the direct-to-DVD fate of the second – Lawrence Gough’s Brookside-inflected horror, Salvage – arriving on our screens a week before the World Cup kick-off with timing that would do Fernando Torres proud.
   It’s the second feature to be directed by Lindy Heymann – eight years after the first, US-set mockumentary Showboy, which she made in collaboration with Christian Taylor. Freely adapting an unproduced screenplay by Michael Winterbottom’s sometime collaborator Laurence Coriat, first-time screenwriter Leigh Campbell examines the strong friendship that quickly develops between a pair of Liverpool lasses, Jasmine (Nichola Burley) and Nicole (Kerrie Hayes) in what’s in some ways a distaff version of Pat Holden’s atmospheric scally-chronicle Awaydays from last year.
   Here, the soccer-mad duo bond over their passionate devotion to a particular player, heart-throb Lee (Jamie Doyle) and are duly devastated to learn he’s about to be transferred to a rival club. Their anger turning to desperation, the duo improvise a “honey-trap” that leads to their idol becoming haplessly captive in a dingy riverside hideout.
   28-year-old Spanish cinematographer Eduard Grau, whose credits include Albert Serra’s ultra-rarefied Honor of the Knights (2005), Tom Ford’s Oscar-nominated A Single Man (2009) and upcoming coffin-enclosed thriller Buried, is the real star of the show here, his high-toned visuals making even the scuzziest of Scouse settings seem oddly entrancing. The soundtrack, featuring several cuts by Liverpool’s electro-pop stars Ladytron, further builds a mood of ominous unease – albeit leavened by typically wry Merseyside humor – while the leads do a decent job of retaining our sympathies even as their characters’ behaviour strays into criminality. The chirpy Burley, who made quite an impact in 2008 Brit-horror Donkey Punch, is also currently on our screens in the rather splashier StreetDance 3D; doll-faced Hayes, meanwhile, projects an arrestingly grave-voiced solemnity reminiscent of Julia Stiles.
   But just as Jasmine and Nicole realise they don’t know how to proceed with their plan once Lee is in their clutches, the movie likewise loses its way during the melodramatic, plausibility-stretching final act (these stretches also marred by the fact that Doyle’s lines sound clumsily post-synched.) So while it may well prove an effective calling-card for the actresses, for Heymann, Campbell and, especially, for Grau, Kicks is itself – with apologies to the denizens of Prenton Park – much more of a plucky little Tranmere Rovers than a Liverpool or Everton.

Neil Young
24th May, 2010
(written for the 2nd June edition of Tribune magazine)

KICKS : [6/10] : UK 2009 (copyright-dated 2008) : Lindy HEYMANN : 84m (BBFC) : seen at Cineworld cinema, Edinburgh, 20th June 2009 (public show – complimentary ticket) – Edinburgh International Film Festival