Goal Club

Director: Kittikorn Liasirikun
Year: 2001
Starring: Suviporn Surattanaves, Suwanhom Theeranai, Yuto Boriwat, Tantrakul Wongwarut
Time: 99 minutes

This fast moving, quickly edited and stylish film contains a lot of energy and is fairly entertaining. It has a number of threads that at times become a bit confusing (especially since there were no subs!) and some of the threads feel less interesting than others do. Still the young actors are all quite good and they give personable performances that make you want to follow their story to the end. Much of the early going is a fairly light coming of age/friendship narrative, but towards the end it turns surprisingly dark and violent.

As best as I could understand it, this is about five young guys just out of high school who seem to have a knack for calling the outcome of English football games that are being shown and gambled on in the many small betting joints around Bangkok. Soon the local gang sees their talents and recruits them as runners and collectors. The film goes off with each character to some degree – one who meets a girl (a member of the group Triumph’s Kingdom), another gets involved with a bar girl and so on. Eventually they decide to thumb their nose at the gang and set up their own betting shop. Bad decision. The gangsters don’t take too kindly to this incursion into their turf and get very nasty. By the end there are a lot of dead bodies spread around town.

The Thai VCD does not contain subs.

My rating for this film: 6.5