Director: Danny Donnelly
Starring: Adam Deacon, Nichola Burley, David Ajala, Sir Geoff Hurst
Running Time: 87 minutes approx
Certificate: 15
Extras: Looking Back Featurette
Football and film are not good bed fellows. It’s a genre dominated by terrible acting from football stars and poor football action, not forgetting nonsensical plots revolving around a star being born, the GOAL films (2005-2009), or even the end of the war ESCAPE TO VICTORY (1981). It’s fair to say at this point my expectations when sitting down on a cloudy Thursday evening to watch PAYBACK SEASON were not very high… well in truth, very, very low. Starring Adam Deacon as pro-footballer Jerome, the film uses his star and money as a backdrop to the dealings of his ‘estate-friends’ from back home in particular Baron (Ajala) and his new business that requires a lot of money that he manipulates out of Jerome.
Beginning with a nice montage showing Jerome’s progress from estate to pro-footballer and the riches that come with it the film then drives itself off of a cliff – a big old, badly acted, poorly scripted, hideously directed cliff; PAYBACK SEASON accentuates everything that is wrong with British cinema it’s reliance on stereotyped characterisation and an abhorrent over use of the term ‘bruv’ and ‘ya know how it is’ in response to every question, remark or breath is tiresome after the first 8 minutes so by the 87th I was pretty much ready to kill, but hey ya know how it is.
PAYBACK SEASON is the kind of film that comes around far too often: it’s short on ideas and lazy in its execution, there is always a necessity when reviewing to provide some balance, but the only positive on show here is the fact someone somewhere is making money off it, no doubt they’re happy, bruv. Oh and Sir Geoff Hurst is in it and incredibly, not the worst thing on show.
Extras: Looking Back is a strange featurette as it shows scene’s being made and then the finished article. Quite an interesting approach but would be nice to have a bit more of an input from the main players.
PAYBACK SEASON is available on Blu-ray and DVD now.
