When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

Thoroughly entertaining and engaging adaptation of a cult novel, i would highly recommend this to anyone who enjoys this style of film - along with I.D., Football Factory, The Firm, Green Street etc this is that type of fast paced take on football hooliganism. The characters are rock solid and portrayed excellently with commitment and enthusiasm. There is an arty, melancholy, even decidedly feminine touch to some parts of the film which lends it a neat contrast. I would actually read the book to understand the characters better - that's how much i enjoyed it! Despite a few very small details picked up by other viewers this is, i feel, a very underrated film which deserves more recognition for daring to be different. The performances by Nicky Bell and Liam Boyle in particular are powerful stuff.

There's a track on Joy Division's 1979 album 'Unknown Pleasures' called 'Insight', in which the narrator - possibly Ian Curtis, possibly a character - reflects on the lost dreams of youth; how he's resolved to never fulfilling them. And how that fact no longer fills him with fear. It's a song for a 45-year-old man sung by a 22-year-old. At the 2 minute 15 second mark, immediately following a sonic shoot-out, there's a strange ribbed sound, in an album filled with extraordinary sounds, repeated three times in quick succession. Hooky's bass? Stephen Morris' snare? Something producer Martin Hannett cooked up over the mixing desk? Who knows? But that sound, at less than a second long, is more interesting than anything in the whole of Awaydays.The 1998 cult novel the film is adapted from, however, is just fascinating. Straddling Liverpool's music and football scenes circa 1979, this complex rites-of-passage tale explores class-tourism, teenage nihilism, pack-violence, and the unspoken homo-erotic tensions in close male friendships. And the music of Joy Division. It's beautiful, poetic, and quite literary, but don't take this reviewer's word for it - take its author Kevin Sampson's: "It's beautiful, poetic, and quite literary." Sampson also wrote the screenplay, about which he says "It's taut and punchy, but poetic too. It's beautiful." Can you detect a theme here? "As a film", he says, "it's in a league of its own." Except this time, it isn't. Awaydays functions as a really good argument for why writers should never be allowed to adapt their own novels for the screen.As in the novel, arty Carty (Nicky Bell) becomes fascinated with the hooligans at Tranmere Rovers. His passport into this knife-wielding, wedge-cut world is Elvis (Liam Boyle), a young working-class romantic-savage who stands at the intersection between two subcultures. The noose he hangs in his new wave riot of a bedroom, "a reminder of the absurdity of life and certainty of death". The unlikely pair embark on a messy, complicated bromance, before the disturbed Elvis drifts into heroin abuse and a depressive spiral, while Carty is sucked ever deeper into a lifestyle he cannot control. Can either of them bail out before something terrible happens? Something terrible already happened - this movie: a pretentious, grubbily voyeuristic paean to football hooliganism, kitted out with ubiquitous slo-mo violence, tactical post-punk hits and retro fashions, while entirely lacking the kind of insights director Alan Clarke brought to 1988's The Firm. There are serious casting problems too: Carty is supposed to be a kind of proto-Renton from Trainspotting, selfish and ruthless - yet Bell possesses all the charisma of Rodders from 'Only Fools And Horses'. The dialogue and delivery also errs on the 'Grange Hill' side, while as is often the case with pop-period dramas, the clothes look too box-fresh and the walk-on bands suspiciously modern-sounding. Another thing that sticks in the craw a bit is the film's use of Joy Division, a band currently enjoying a huge cultural resuscitation. As in the novel, Awaydays heavily genuflects to everybody's favourite Ballardian bards, thematically and musically. Scene after scene depicts Carty and Elvis gazing out over the Mersey, dreaming of Berlin, while enormous chemical barges drift by to doomy soundtracks from Unknown Pleasures and Closer. "Where will it end?" Elvis repeatedly quotes from 'Day Of The Lords'. While his exit, he assures Carty, will be facilitated to the strains of Curtis, Hooky and Co: "'New Dawn Fades' on low, noose around the neck, off we jolly well pop." All this, at least, is in context. And yet... and yet had Awaydays been made by anyone other than Sampson and producer Dave Hughes (both original scenesters), and had Sampson not already doffed his cap to them, you'd swear blind its makers were cynically exploiting the music and mythos of this immensely popular band to peddle their poxy movie. As Nigel Blackwell of Birkenhead's Half Man Half Biscuit sung in 2005, "I've been to a post-punk postcard fair in me Joy Division oven gloves", a comment on the lengths merchandising will go to turn profundity into commodity. (Satire so often being a psychic projection of future reality, two years later Yo! Sushi was offering diners a 'Love Will Tear Us Apart' salmon and tuna takeaway box set.) Awaydays' use of the group's music does seem contrived and desperate, but perhaps it isn't the film's fault. Ian Curtis has been metaphorically exhumed so many times since 1980, it's eventually bound to result in Joy fatigue. Familiarity will tear us apart. And yet nobody's really to blame. Certainly not New Order. Nor Anton Corbijn. Or even Tony Wilson, God rest him. If anything, it's probably our fault. The market is duly rounding up every last shred of the past to cater to our insatiable nostalgia. That definitive album (until the next even more 'definitive' one), complete with 15 outtakes, seven additional remixes, 52 alternate versions and a live gig, is ours for the download. Along, no doubt, with the Ian Curtis pincushion, jelly mould and soap-on-a-rope. Where will it end, indeed?

I've just ploughed my way through this mess of a film on DVD. It started off very promising, I liked the music and that it was set in the late 1970s. Also the fact that it was a hooligan film not set in London was very refreshing. However it quickly descended into tedious self indulgent drivel. It was one of those films where after an hour or so you felt that every scene might be the last and the place where it ended didn't make any more sense than it ending anywhere else. The fight scenes were pure fantasy. A bunch of wimpy young lads seemed to be able to go anywhere and turn over gangs of hardened grown men. The violence was also presented as deep and profound as if it was it was the perfect back drop to the tortured sound of bands like Joy Division. When one of The Pack murders the gang leader by cutting in his throat in a crowded pub with no apparent repercussions legal or otherwise I realised this was a a fantasy film. A middle class art students take on what it is to be violent. By the end I was barely aware of what was going on I was so bored. I give it a 3 rather than a 1 for the music, the fashion and the haircuts.

I'm sure this film isn't everyone's cup o' tea, I went in not expecting much, just hoping the soundtrack would live up to the hype. But I've got to say it is an amazingly good passage-of-rites drama. Vicious and Beautiful, it defies genre and is totally refreshing.Nicky Bell and Liam Boyle are two real discoveries, Boyle's Elvis character is pitch perfect, a complex and compelling performance that will make him a star, whilst Bell broods convincingly throughout.It has the best soundtrack ever. No messing around! Makes me wish I was around for that 1979 post punk period.Awaydays has a purposely ( I assume ) lo-fi look which really helps convey the grim post-thatcher Merseyside setting. All the clothes and general design looks spot on ( and often eerily contemporary ) Best film of the year by far.I pray that Elvis didn't die and ends up in Berlin so there's a sequel.