The Damned United (2009)

	Directed by: Tom Hooper	COUNTRY United Kingdom GENRE Sports/Drama NORWEGIAN TITLE The Damned United RUNNING TIME 97 minutes
	Produced by: Andy Harries Grainne Marmion
	Written by (based on the book by David Peace): Peter Morgan

Cast includes:
CHARACTER	ACTOR/ACTRESS	RATING
Brian Clough	Michael Sheen
Peter Taylor	Timothy Spall
Don Revie	Colm Meaney	½
Sam Longson	Jim Broadbent
Terry Cooper	Andy Graham	-
Jimmy Gordon	Maurice Roëves	-
Barbara Clough	Elizabeth Carling	-
Billy Bremner	Stephen Graham
Johnny Giles	Peter McDonald	-
Terry Yorath	Bill Bradshaw	-
Eddie Gray	Stuart Gray	-
Gordon McQueen	John Savage	-
Norman Hunter	Mark Cameron	-
Peter Lorimer	Matthew Storton	-

Review

Muddy, wobbly pitches, toothless, working-class players, and league championships won by the likes of Leeds United and Derby County. The Damned United recreates the English football scene of the 1970s, when the game was unglamorous, brutal, and almost never televised – but it never quite manages to do so completely convincingly, or without resorting to unnecessary artistic liberties.

The story concerns the young and brazen manager Brian Clough and his assistant Peter Taylor, and how they first took minnows Derby County from the bottom of the Second Division to winning the First Division in just a few years, before they were hired as the new management of reigning champions Leeds United, when their manager Don Revie was appointed new England manager in the summer of 1974. Clough's disastrous 44-day tenure at Leeds serves as the admittedly rather funny basis for the story, written by Peter Morgan and based on David Peace's best-selling book released three years prior.

Michael Sheen is brilliantly cast as Clough – he nails his looks, demeanour and smugness rather effortlessly and becomes an agreeable focal point for the story. It's Sheen's performance and Clough's persona that largely carry the film, because the filmmakers don't quite succeed in convincingly portraying the dynamics of the game of football itself. Yes, we're taken behind the scenes in smoky boardrooms, given access to the red-bricked dressing rooms, and placed under the 1970s floodlights, but the action on the pitch too often feels contrived, and the drama between players and staff too simplified to come across as believable – and thus absorbing on a level that transcends jolly, nostalgic entertainment.