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THE
FOOTBALL FACTORY
6/10
UK
2004 : Nick LOVE : 90 mins
London, 2003.
Tommy Johnson (Danny Dyer) is a middle-ranking member of a gang of hooligans
united by their love of: (in no particular order) Chelsea FC; punch-ups
with rival fans; and getting 'off their heads' on drink/drugs. With his
30th birthday just around the corner, the not-too-bright Tommy senses
he is approaching a decisive crossroads in his life: will he 'grow out'
of and turn away from his violent activities, or embrace them further?
The Football Factory is based on the novel of the same title by John King, which nestles on many booksellers' shelves alongside tell-all ruck-a-thons by real-life football hooligans. But King doesn't really belong such company - he was named by no less an eminence than John Bayley (former Oxford Professor of Literature; played by Jim Broadbent in Iris) as among the best of Britain's younger novelists.
A movie intended
for a mass audience, Love's adaptation of The Football Factory necessarily
loses much of King's subtlety - the racism of the football hooligan world
is noticeably soft-pedalled; some of the storytelling is a little sloppy;
much of the characterisation and plotting (including the 'tragic' climax)
is too predictable. But there's a more disturbing problem: so slick is
the film's surface that many viewers will be content to revel in its bursts
of kinetic brutishness. After one pre-release screening, a young audience-member
emerged with the enthusiastic comment that "You will want to put
on your Stone Island jumper and kick the f*ck out of somebody."
As a one-line
movie review, this hardly rivals the Pope's hastily-retracted "It
is as it was" verdict on Mel Gibson's Jesus
H Christ - and the film's producers are hardly likely to put it
on their posters, given the current pre-Euro 2004 hysteria about football
violence. But tagline they did choose ("This is England's
worst nightmare. Enjoy it") does seem blatantly intended to lure
in the Tommy Johnsons of this world rather than the John Bayleys. In Nick
Love's own words, "It is unasahamedly aimed at the people it is about
- men who do not want to grow up."
Despite these
ill-advised statements, there's still plenty of John King in The Football
Factory, for anyone with the patience (and inclination) to look beyond
its hyped-up, Trainspotting/GoodFellas/Lock-Stock
direction. The film repeatedly and emphatically undercuts both Tommy and
the louts he admires, such as 40-something "hard-man" Billy
Bright (Frank Harper as a bulky, North-London cross between De Niro and
Pesci). If nothing else, Tommy's boorish, sub-Clockwork-Orange
voice-over makes him pretty difficult to warm to: "the next best
thing to violence is sex," he proclaims at one point.
And he turns
out to be spectacularly unsuccessful in that department, his insecurities
compounded by his lack of "inches" downstairs. As in Love's
debut, Goodbye Charlie Bright, there's a latent but distinct homoerotic
subtext detectable at several points - women generally don't figure very
strongly in this psychotically masculine environment, and there's much
celebration when when Tommy's best mate Rod (Neil Maskell) abandons his
(caricature) middle-class girlfriend to return to the welcoming bosom
of his male pals. And Love is very careful to emphasise that these men
aren't really "football fans" at all - at no stage do either
the characters or the audience get to see an actual professional game.
"Was
it worth it?" (or rather "Woz i' worf i'?") Tommy asks
himself at both the beginning of the film and the end. "Course it
fuckin' woz!" he answers, and Love seems to endorse Tommy's decision
by closing with a chirpy photo-gallery round-up of the various characters'
fates. On closer reflection, however, many viewers will decide that Tommy
is simply retreating further into his fantasy-land of delusion and self-justification,
and that his abrasively repellent hooliganism wasn't "worth it"
at all. Of course, (too) many other viewers - especially those underage
lads who got their hands on the ubuquitous £5 pirated DVDs - won't have
time to reflect at all. They'll be too busy pulling on their Stone Island
jumpers and getting ready to kick the f*ck out of somebody.
19th May,
2004
(seen 11th May : Odeon, Gate, Newcastle-upon-Tyne : press show)
by Neil
Young
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