More Over Dreamworks

We at STT take great pleasure when football crosses over into cinema, mainly because the results tend to be just so ridiculous. This is no exception.

Constructing my perfect movie, there are certain elements that must be there: clever pun in the title, East End of London setting, larger-than-life ‘gangstas,’ ex-convict-trying-to-go-straight-but-only-after-this-final-job narrative, an incongruous appearance by an American rapper, Danny Dyer playing Danny Dyer, and Executive Producer credits for Premier League footballers. In case you haven’t guessed, this latest effort from director Alex de Rakoff (writer / director of something called The Calcium Kid which amusingly starred Orlando Bloom as a boxer) ticks literally every box.

So, here are the specifics: the flick is called DEAD MAN RUNNING, started shooting today down the road from my actual manor in Stepney, London, and stars Danny Dyer as an ex-con who has to raise £100,000 in 24 hours to pay off a loan shark, brilliantly cast as 50 Cent. According to industry gossip, Dyer “races from the dog tracks of East London to the drug scene of Manchester in order to raise the money, playing as fast and dirty as he has to in order to get the money before the deadline.” I’m out of breath just reading that.

And pulling the strings behind this masterpiece is the dream team of Rio Ferdinand and Ashley Cole, who were apparently rinsed for a couple of million each to finance this abortion. Strange that they should choose to pump their hard-earned moolah into something that will probably make Rise of the Foot Soldier look like The Long Good Friday though. With their combined intellect and cultural awareness, wouldn’t you expect them instead to bankroll a modern interpretation of Petronius’ incomplete Roman existential novel The Satyricon?

You know, this would all be hilarious if it wasn’t just so ultimately depressing for myriad reasons. First and foremost, what must other British filmmakers think of the continuing slew of sub-Guy Ritchie crap? It’s a sad state of affairs when someone as talented as Shane Meadows has to grovel at the feet of Eurostar to finance his latest picture, and yet these two idiots can get anything made by snapping their fingers, just because they want to meet 50 Cent.

The worst part of this whole debacle though is that the settings of London and Manchester have clearly not been chosen at random, and I fully expect cameos from both brain donors. Rio will presumably be playing an ‘amusingly-named’ character along the lines of Mitch the Merker, while Ashley Cole will have a ‘post-modern’ character trait of being sick on girls’ floors during what, for him, passes as sex.

So when these clowns can’t be bothered to play for their country, they’re treading water and reading scripts. And when they’re complaining about having to donate 10 quid a week to nurses, they’re actually just skimming the top off their wages to promote more insulting English stereotypes.

I despair.