Something to watch tonight: Wednesday 13 August

Final Score (Mann, 2018)

The English Premier League football season starts this weekend after an interminable 11-week hiatus so I thought I would try and find something football-adjacent to celebrate the fact.

Back in May 2016, West Ham United played their final game at the venerable but ageing old stadium, The Boleyn Ground at Upton Park, in the heart of London’s East End. The following season they moved their home a few km up the road to the former 2012 Olympic Stadium at Stratford, now known — thanks to a lack of corporate sponsorship — as the London Stadium.

That final match was a footballing triumph— a dramatic 3-2 victory over Manchester United — and an emotional occasion, but it wasn’t the last act for the Boleyn Ground. The always-classy club owners rented it out for a few weeks to a film production and the first steps of the eventual demolition of the facility were helped on by some Hollywood-scale explosions.

Final Score is a creditable action film, not just in the mould of Die Hard but an almost carbon copy in the first half. The best actor of all the former wrestlers working in film today, Dave Bautista¹, plays a US Army and private contracting veteran visiting London to check in on the daughter of a deceased colleague. He’s become an “Uncle Mike” to the rebellious teenager, Danni (Lara Peake), and has bought her tickets to West Ham’s final game at the Boleyn Ground – in a clear signal that the film is a fantasy the last game is a European semi-final against a Russian team.

But that Russian team brings Russian fans, and along with the fans there are a gang of self-styled freedom fighters plotting a revolution to separate their fictional state from the Russian Federation. They’ve wired up the grandstand with explosives, shut down the cell towers and landlines, taken control of the security centre and are frantically looking for one face in the crowd — Pierce Brosnan as their former leader, now living a football-loving life in London after faking his own death.

Only Mike — and a skinny but committed steward named Faisal — can stop them now. While 35,000 fans watch the game from the edge of their seats, Mike and the terrorists (led by the late Ray Stevenson) battle it out behind-the-scenes, including a wild motorcycle chase through the East Stand concourse and up into the gantry above.

Nowhere near as emotional as the actual final match — which could have been called Cry Hard — watching Final Score is a nostalgic trip for me. I once walked on that pitch and, in a very sad state of affairs, I have never deleted the 2016 version of the FIFA video game from my Xbox so I can still occasionally play in the virtual stadium².

The club committed fully to supporting the production, much as they did later on when they became the ‘big club’ antagonists of Ted Lasso’s underdogs AFC Richmond. Co-owner David Sullivan came up with the idea of using the ground as a location and was an executive producer. The club also lent former players Rufus Brevett and Tony Cottee to play TV pundits who meet a sticky end.

I’m not going to pretend Final Score is a great film but it’s better than a lot of Die Hard clones, helped by being anchored in a place and time that was about to disappear³.

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Where to watch Final Score