PURELY BELTER

Directed by Mark Herman. Starring Chris Beattie, Greg McLane, Tim Healy, Kevin Whately

Latest in the mindbogglingly endless line of feelgood northern-English 'heartwarmers', the curiously engaging Purely Belter derives fairly straightforwardly from a novel by Gateshead schoolteacher (and presumably Roddy Doyle-wannabe) Jonathan Tulloch. The novel - which we opted to abandon after six pages - is a sub-literate swamp of painful Irvine Welsh-gone-Geordie phoneticisms and life's-a-bitch loser philosophy, but the movie itself somehow exudes enough amiability to excuse its general low-rent ineptitude.

Directed by Brassed Off's Mark Herman, it's a gutter-to-stars vision of two frustrated Geordie teens' apparently-doomed quest to rustle up the readies for a Toon Army season ticket, and it rattles along in amiable if over-sentimental mode throughout.

Teenage best friends (impish Gerry and rotund Sewell) have all the prospects of Ann Widdecombe on the pull in Ibiza: Gerry is a compulsive truant whose family is stalked by a demonic alcoholic father, haunted by a smack-ravaged sister, and whose schooldays are tormented by a tyrannical PE instructor.

Meanwhile, his best mate Sewell is a good-natured tub of lard who lives with his almost-alive grandfather - and finds time to knock up schoolgirl Gemma, who leaves him for local neanderthal Zack in some hope of a 'better life', as Zack, alone among the dreary delinquent-Gazza landscape in which Belter unfolds, actually has a job.

However, in spite of their myriad dificulties, our heroes have a dream: the thought of a season ticket to St.James' Park to watch their beloved Newcastle FC renders them so entranced that they swear to forsake their staple diet of dope and alcohol - and enter the dreary and dispiriting world of wage-earning! - in order to conjure up enough cash to take their place on the Gallowgate end.

Judged in terms of social value, there are enough clear-sighted observations in Belter to make it potentially momentous: it's an unsparing indictment of post-privatisation Premiership footie and its enforced departure from 'them days when anyone could go, you didn't have to be loaded'. But with depressing inevitabilty, the film swiftly falls into the trap of bland feelgood Full Monty/Billy Elliot coziness, thus neutralising (if not destroying) the inherent black-comedy potential offered by the material. All the same, there are occasional flashes here that border on the inspirational.

Almost essential.