Football Factory (Special Edition) [2004] [DVD]

Published in 1996, John King's novel Football Factory was a gripping insight into the mind of a 1980s football hooligan. Deranged but believable, it raised issues of class, race, tribal allegiance and the masculine capacity for violence. Any hooligan drama will suffer comparisons to Alan Clarke's gritty The Firm, but director Nick Love's makes Football Factory seem distinctly lightweight and infatuated with its subjects.. There's endless macho posturing, particularly, to the point of tedium.
Narrator Tommy Johnson (Danny Dyer) is part of the infamous real-life Chelsea firm, the Headhunters. With best friend Bob and Zeberdee, he lives for away days to rival firms Millwall. To Tommy a man approaching his thirtys it's all one big adrenaline rush. In a whirl of drugs, shagging and casual violence, there's barely a football kicked, and his lifestyle is contrasted with that of his granddad, railing at the selfishness of the younger generation.

The Football Factory' is a film that has absolutely nothing to do with football. You won't see a blade of grass, a ball, or a set of goals anywhere within its 93 minutes. Neither, for that matter, will you see a waving scarf. ,
`The Football Factory' is about one thing and one thing only: hooligans. Sure, they're hooligans who attach themselves to one English football club or another (in this case Chelsea). But, if they're also football supporters, it's certainly not something writer-director Nick Love has any interest in. A fter all, at no point in the film is football even spoken about. You've got to hand it to Love though he's assembled a convincing band of Guy Ritchie cast-off types, and his scenes of inner-city street warfare are frighteningly realistic. But there's no discernable plotline, no form of redemption for any of our characters, and nobody for the right-thinking viewer to side with. Yup, there's a moral lesson thrown in for our lead protagonist, but it never looks like it's been included as anything more than a minor afterthought in an extremely weak effort to justify the film's existence. Without a shadow of a doubt, this is a film that revels in its subject matter. West Ham's Inter City Firm, Chelsea's Headhunters and Millwall's Bushwacker,: are just a few of the infamous gangs who established reputations as some of the most feared and active mobs in English football. and the film follows the build-up to an FA Cup tie between these fierce rivals.

Raw, violent, compassionate. Narassistic, and often extremely funny, The Football Factory will appeal to all those who played (and still play) the game. This film is the best of the crop, Forget away days, The firm 1998 and 2009 and the ludicrous green street. But with all these films there is a undercurrent of subservient brotherly love. Danny Dyer once again steals the show with his off the peg character, but Danny how many times can you be transplanted try something new.

I read a review of The Football Factory that said the characters are so "orrible" and "hateful" it was impossible to like them at all! You have to think that that particular reviewer knows nothing about the subject matter of the film he was writing about. Does he think that hoards of footie hooligans, who delight in knocking seven bells of tar out of each other, want to be liked?

The Football Factory is directed by Nick Love and based on the book of the same name written by John King. It stars Danny Dyer {who else really?}, Frank Harper, Neil Maskell and Tamer Hassan {Hassan fans should note he's rarely in it tho}. The story is about what was termed The English Disease, a disease where like minded adults from various walks of life, religiously took to fighting like minded adults, in the name of what football team they happened to support. There's been a ream of books written on the subject, from those involved and by those who haven't a clue outside of reading their Sunday Times articles back in the day. There's also been one or two films about the subject, from pretty ace efforts like Phillip Davis' ID, to middling tellings such as Elijah Wood starrer Green Street. It's a subject that people seem hell bent on dissecting and attempting to get to the bottom of.

So with that in mind, Love's movie is something of a triumph in that it tries the hardest to understand its topic. To those on the outside of football hooliganism, it looks like a bunch of blokes mindlessly inflicting harm on each other whilst simultaneously damaging the good name of the national sport. But Love, with help from King's source, explores ego led tribalism, male bonding, male conformity and dissatisfaction of life in general. Throw in the punches and a ream of genuine laughs and you got a film that is easy to like if you belong to a certain demographic. Here is the problem if you are not a geezer, a tribal footie fan or a mindless thug, The Football Factory holds no appeal to the casual observer, which is a shame, because as stated previously, it's trying hard to reason and understand. There's for instance a cracking plot-strand involving two old fella's, Tommy's {Dyer} granddad Bill {Dudley Sutton} & Albert {John Junkin}. Both lifelong pals who have grown tired of what "their" Britain has become, thus they are in the process of emigrating to Australia. This dovetails smartly with the unfolding story of football violence perpetrated by the kids of the day. Generational differences? Perhaps, maybe?

The cast are strong, either fitting the mean profile perfectly {Harper/Hassan} or delivering the needed cocky swagger line {Dyer}, Love has assembled, what is for the material at hand, the perfect cast. OK we probably could have done with Vinnie Jones or Ross Kemp in there somewhere, but it's a low budget movie you know! The fight scenes are grim and look authentic and the soundtrack rocks the large one too. So is it glamorising a touchy subject? Well yes it is, if you are a football hooligan yourself that is. It's not a perfect film by any stretch of the imagination, but it has good intentions in there, even if not all of them are fully realised. To which it leaves us with an impacting, intriguing and uneasily enjoyable movie. 7.5/10

Great film - all the characters were believable and realistic. It conveyed the loyalty and brotherhood of these "firms" brilliantly and managed many comic moments.

All in all, very true to life - no characters were unbeleivable.

Tip for Ms McDonald - don't buy a film about football hooligans and complain when its violent. I don't like what they do, nobody does, but your apparent dislike of hooliganism is irrelevant when reviewing the quality of the film. It matters not whether you liked it or not - its was the film that you were supposed to be reviewing.