Running time: 98 minutes
Rating 6 out of 10
Thanks to some spirited performances and a keen eye for period detail, The Damned United is an entertaining look at football culture in England in the early 1970s, but it doesn't have the impact of the previous films by the screenwriter Peter Morgan. His previous scripts have included The Queen, Frost/Nixon and The Last King of Scotland which have all peeled away layer upon layer of their subjects and ultimately revealed some inner truths. This is not the case here, and it is firmly a skin-deep affair.
But plenty of this is very jolly. Brian Clough (Michael Sheen) was a huge force in the game, one of the first to really understand the power of self-promotion. As portrayed here - in another convincing turn from Sheen - he was more talk than action and it was his number two Peter Taylor (an extraordinary performance by Timothy Spall) who was the power behind this particular throne. 'You're the shop front and I'm the goods', Taylor tells his boss at one point.
The film tries to explain Clough's short-lived reign at Leeds United, then the dominant force in British football, where he took over the reigns from the revered Don Revie (an excellent Colm Meaney). It does so by taking us back to Clough and Taylor's incredible success with Derby County and an emnity that sprang up between Clough and both Revie and the Leeds team itself. It's not really surprising that Clough failed: but what is surprising is the rather simplistic spin that is put on it. As it is portrayed, his new Leeds charges didn't like him, he didn't really bother that much with training, and it all fell apart pretty quickly.
There are oddly plotted moments and some unusual mini-peaks, but the overall problem with the film may simply be that the source material is simply too difficult to translate. David Peace's stream-of-consciousness novel presents a fictionalised account of Clough's reign (he's less bitter on the screen than on the page, although he's not really portrayed that positively) told in the first person. Here we observe him from the outside, with only occasional (and also bizarre) forays into his mind, and it doesn't have the same effect.
There was an extraordinary error at the screening I attended when Clough's future club, Nottingham Forest, was incorrectly spelt on screen. It is to be hoped that this is a one-off and not on the general release copies of the film.
Paul Hurley
But plenty of this is very jolly. Brian Clough (Michael Sheen) was a huge force in the game, one of the first to really understand the power of self-promotion. As portrayed here - in another convincing turn from Sheen - he was more talk than action and it was his number two Peter Taylor (an extraordinary performance by Timothy Spall) who was the power behind this particular throne. 'You're the shop front and I'm the goods', Taylor tells his boss at one point.
The film tries to explain Clough's short-lived reign at Leeds United, then the dominant force in British football, where he took over the reigns from the revered Don Revie (an excellent Colm Meaney). It does so by taking us back to Clough and Taylor's incredible success with Derby County and an emnity that sprang up between Clough and both Revie and the Leeds team itself. It's not really surprising that Clough failed: but what is surprising is the rather simplistic spin that is put on it. As it is portrayed, his new Leeds charges didn't like him, he didn't really bother that much with training, and it all fell apart pretty quickly.
There are oddly plotted moments and some unusual mini-peaks, but the overall problem with the film may simply be that the source material is simply too difficult to translate. David Peace's stream-of-consciousness novel presents a fictionalised account of Clough's reign (he's less bitter on the screen than on the page, although he's not really portrayed that positively) told in the first person. Here we observe him from the outside, with only occasional (and also bizarre) forays into his mind, and it doesn't have the same effect.
There was an extraordinary error at the screening I attended when Clough's future club, Nottingham Forest, was incorrectly spelt on screen. It is to be hoped that this is a one-off and not on the general release copies of the film.
Paul Hurley
