Plot
Danny Meehan, a former captain of the English national football team who was banned from football for life for fixing a match between England and Germany, is sentenced to three years in Longmarsh prison for assaulting two police officers after a lengthy drinking session and driving wildly to a local bar.
Once inside, he is promptly beaten by the prison guards for misbehaving, and is subsequently approached by the prison governor. The governor offers Meehan a job as coach of the prison wardens' football team; the guards who are members of the team, tell Meehan not to accept and threaten to maltreat him if he does so. Meehan declines the offer, and instead offers to train a team consisting of other inmates, who will take on the wardens in a practice match.
Meehan ends up with the resident contraband dealer, Massive, as his right-hand man. He also receives advice from an elderly convict, Doc, who teaches Meehan prison lore. Meehan wins the respect of the other inmates after he attacks an officer, Mr. Ratchett, who is attacking Massive, and is then occupied with the task of training up his team of cons, including a maximum-security con named Monk (Jason Statham) a violent Scottish inmate.
At half time, the inmates' team, Mean Machine is winning 1-0, and things are going well until the governor attempts to blackmail Meehan into throwing the match. At first he puts his own interests before that of the team's, playing quite badly but as the final moments of the game tick down, he redeems himself, and uses a square-ball to fellow inmate 'Billy the Limpet' (Danny Dyer) to win the game for the cons.
Read more about this topic: Mean Machine (film)
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“But, when to Sin our byast Nature leans,
The careful Devil is still at hand with means;
And providently Pimps for ill desires:
The Good Old Cause, reviv’d, a Plot requires,
Plots, true or false, are necessary things,
To raise up Common-wealths and ruine Kings.”
—John Dryden (1631–1700)
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)