‘My wife’s going to leave me, my mates think I’m a wrong’un, and I’ve turned my son into a lunatic…’
You know what to expect from a Nick Love film. The Football Factory, The Business, Outlaw… these are unsubtle, visceral films about football, drugs and shagging. Easy to parody, easy to dismiss, yet they also explore a corner of working-class culture often excluded from mainstream cinema. Marching Powder, his latest team-up with Danny fackin’ Dyer, asks what happens when the football hooligans are forced to grow up…
Jack Jones (Dyer) earns the wrath of his long-suffering wife, Dani (Stephanie Leonidas), when he is taken to court for fighting and cocaine possession and given six weeks by the judge to turn his life around. Whether this kind of ultimatum actually occurs in the British court system is unlikely, but then, this film exists almost entirely in a world of fantasy.
Other than moving from supporting one of the big dogs of English football to following a lower-league team, and preferring a cuddle to having sex (the latter is too physically demanding), not much has changed for Love’s characters. Marching Powder was marketed as a love story, and while the relationship between Jack and Dani provides the film’s heartbeat, this is essentially a greatest hits of Love’s previous output. Football firms, fighting and copious amounts of cocaine are the order of the day, and it’s hard not to wonder what, if anything, this film has to say about its characters.
That being said, Dyer is always a compelling onscreen presence; you can’t help but like him even when his character is irredeemably awful, and one thing you can rely on Love for is laughs. He knows his way around a one-liner, and I found myself chuckling throughout Marching Powder, mainly at the audacity of it all.
Love’s latest sometimes veers uncomfortably closer to the Rise of the Footsoldier franchise than to the director’s own previous work, but taken on its own terms, Marching Powder is nothing if not entertaining. Would you expect anything less?
