Film: From goals to roles

Referees know that footballers can act. But now, thanks to Vinnie Jones and Eric Cantona, so do cinema audiences.

Two forthcoming films that show British film-making at its best could not, on the face of it, be more different. Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels is a low-budget gangster movie that stalks the crime-infested alleys of the East End. Elizabeth is a sumptuous historical drama that tours some of 16th-century England's more desirable residences. But they do have two things in common. They are both unflinchingly violent, and they each mark the British screen debut of an infamous footballer.

In the case of Vinnie Jones, those two are not necessarily unconnected. In Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Jones plays Big Chris, a small- time debt collector in a black-leather coat who oozes a fascinating mixture of menace and humility. The film has the narrative value of a cartoon strip, and Jones fits seamlessly into that world of simplistic psychology. In essence, Jones plays exactly the same character in the film as he plays on the pitch, an enforcer who operates on the wrong side of the law. The salient change is that, on the pitch, Jones likes to leave his mark on an opponents early doors. In the film he saves his explosion of violence for the finale - although it still involves a door, but in collision with a head.

In the case of Eric Cantona, casting has been almost as studiously to type, but not quite. In Elizabeth he plays Monsieur de Foi, the sumptuously- bearded French ambassador to the English court. He is a foppish popinjay in gilded doublet who, like the rest of the French in the film, has a hint of the cartoon foreigner about him. His hopeless task is to press the suit of the cross-dressing Duc d'Anjou, who seeks Elizabeth's hand in marriage. Like Cantona the footballer, in other words, his job is to deploy guile to break down foreign defences. Unlike Cantona, he is one of the few characters who would be incapable of lunging studs first at an enemy's chest, or whatever the Tudor equivalent would be.

The big surprise is the quality of both performances. At a screening this week, there were sniggers when Cantona's name appeared in the opening credits after Kathy Burke's. But that is no more than a reflection of the axiom that footballers are as bad at acting as actors are at football. When they feign injury on the pitch, spectators can usually see right through the performance from row Z. This talentlessness has been showcased, most infamously, in Escape to Victory, starring Pele, Bobby Moore and, er, Ipswich Town's John Wark. More recently, commercials have reinforced the point. Gary Lineker couldn't act his way out of a packet of crisps. Peter Schmeichel isn't much of a ham.

But Cantona, who in Elizabeth trades dialogue with the Manchester United fan Christopher Eccleston and the Chelsea fans Richard Attenborough and Joseph Fiennes, just about holds his own, while Jones is compelling. In a film about robbery, he appropriately steals the movie from under the nose of more established actors. Mirabile dictu, as they used to say in the Wimbledon dressing-room, it is perhaps the finest thing he has ever done. He may even have missed his calling.

This is quite what your man meant when he called "all the men and women merely players". But what with all those footballers going out with pop stars, the two films will further narrow the gap between show business and the beautiful game. A lot of footballers close to retirement - who have been wondering whether to pull pints in their own pub or don the manager's tracksuit - will now be thinking that they have another option: if nothing else crops up, there's always Pinewood.

In fact, it's doubtful whether any other footballers of the same vintage would have been invited across the Rubicon into film. For very different reasons, Jones and Cantona are probably the two most iconic players of their generation, and they have been asked along to do no more than play versions of themselves. Graeme Souness, a similarly charismatic footballer from an earlier generation, made a decent fist of playing himself in Alan Bleasdale's Boys from the Blackstuff. Jones got the role in Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels because the writer originally conceived Big Chris as having the same psychological profile as Jones. Cantona was sensible casting as a French ambassador if only because that is precisely the role he has always fulfilled over here.

Their ultimate value to the film is not in their ability to portray characters of limited complexity - though it clearly helps that neither has disgraced himself - but in other areas. Casting Jones has brought the film the lion's share of its publicity, to which Jones has helpfully contributed by getting himself a conviction for assault - although he hasn't talked about this in his wall-to-wall interviews . Likewise, Cantona's presence in Elizabeth has created huge advance awareness. Fortuitously, it so happened that filming took place soon after his retirement, when he was the subject of tabloid obsession. But there was opportunism as well as coincidence in his casting. It will have been calculated that curiosity to see him act will bring in the armchair fans of Manchester United who might otherwise have given the film a wide berth.

The two performances mirror a continuing drama of the British game, in which the honest toiler, born and bred in England, finds himself bamboozled by the wiliness of the foreign interloper. Cantona is the most successful foreigner to have played in England, and Jones, a former hod-carrier, is the most quintessentially British of yeoman footballers. Intriguingly, their simultaneous transfer to the screen has produced what in knockout competition is known as an upset.

Jones is not as good at football as Cantona was. But he's better at acting than Cantona. He may even be better at acting than he is at football. Those who argue that he could not be worse might like to measure the distance between Vinnie and Big Chris before they say so in public.