“Writer-director Nick Love’s film Marching Powder, about a very different brand of working-class Londoner, is no kind of treat.”, — write: www.dailymail.co.uk
Verdict: Brutish and crass
Rating:
Writer-director Nick Love’s film Marching Powder, about a very different brand of working-class Londoner, is no kind of treat.
That is, unless you savour multiple use of the C-word, in which dubious accomplishment it surely sets some kind of record.
Danny Dyer plays Jack, a 45-year-old thug addicted to cocaine and football hooliganism. After he is arrested following a street battle in Grimsby, a judge tells him that he has six weeks to mend his ways or he will be jailed.
He must give up drugs and violence, which will jeopardise his status with his loutish, like-minded friends, but might help to repair his marriage to the long-suffering Dani (Stephane Leonidas).
It is Dani’s father, a millionaire builder, to whom Jack owes his lavish lifestyle — but only for as long as he and Dani stay together.
Unhelpfully, his father-in-law (who also funds a private-school education for Jack’s son JJ, played by Dyer’s real-life son Arty), then decrees that Jack must chaperone his bi-polar brother-in-law, Kenny Boy, just released from prison, making it a lot harder to stay on the straight and narrow.
That’s pretty much it. Anyone who had the misfortune to see Love’s 2004 film The Football Factory, also starring Dyer, will recognise the way it glorifies alpha-male brutishness while masquerading as an indictment of it.
I loathed pretty much every moment of this movie and its mannered, sub-Guy Ritchie style, but it did remind me of a story I cherish.
A few years ago, according to a policeman friend of mine, a bunch of middle-aged Aston Villa hooligans arranged a dust-up in a supermarket car park with a Crewe Alexandra gang before a pre-season friendly.
When they arrived and realised their adversaries were kids, no older than 16, they advised them to go home before they got hurt. Happily, the advice was taken.
But the detail I have always loved is that the Crewe gang called themselves ‘The Crewetons’, thinking it made them sound hard, not that it evoked little fried cubes of bread floating on top of a wholesome soup.
It’s like slipping back to the early days of Guy Ritchie… only nothing like as good Matthew Bond’s review of Marching Powder
Rating:
Danny Dyer is fast approaching the status of national treasure, partly because of his long stint on EastEnders, partly because of his lucrative side-hustle as a gameshow host but mainly through appearing, seemingly unrepentantly, in more bad films than almost any other actor.
Sadly he’s at it again in the unpromisingly titled Marching Powder, which seems him reuniting with writer-director, Nick Love, with whom he made The Football Factory and Goodbye Charlie Bright, a quarter of a century ago.
I admire the loyalty but the end result, set in a world of middle-aged football hooligans powered by lager and cocaine, is like slipping back to the early days of Guy Ritchie… only nothing like as good.
Go expecting a torrent of foul language, quite a lot of head-butting and Dyer cheekily breaking the fourth wall to address us directly.
The one surprise is Stephanie Leonidas being quite good as his long-suffering wife.