Marching Powder review: Like a kick in the knackers
Dyer reunites with director Nick Love for this new comedy – 21 years after they teamed up on The Football Factory
TrueBrit Entertainment
- James Mottram
★★☆☆☆
Marching Powder is in cinemas on now. Add it to your watchlist
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Danny Dyer is back where he belongs, in the arms of his old muckah, Nick Love.
The director first cast Dyer in 2001’s Goodbye Charlie Bright and helped carve out the actor’s reputation in laddish films like hooligan drama The Football Factory (2004) and gangland tales The Business (2005) and Outlaw (2007).
After a hiatus of 18 years, the pair are finally reunited for Marching Powder, a comical adventure that’s about as woke as an evening with Donald Trump.
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Powered by its provocative title (a euphemism for cocaine), the film centres on Dyer’s Jack, a 45-year-old lout who likes nothing more than casual violence, boozing and sniffing as much white powder as he can get up his nose.
Married to Dani (Stephanie Leonidas), he has a young son and – fortunately for him – a reasonably well-off father-in-law (Geoff Bell), who runs a scaffolding firm. It’s not exactly clear why, but they’ve all been accepting of Jack’s selfish impulses for years.
Things change, however, when Jack gets arrested and – for some unknown reason – the judge gives him six weeks to turn his life around. Get a job and repair his marriage, by attending couples’ therapy, he’s told.
Danny Dyer and Stephanie Leonidas in Marching Powder. TrueBrit Entertainment
Dani’s father also wants him to look after her brother, the unhinged (and bipolar) Kenny Boy (Calum MacNab), when all Jack wants to do is join his mates to take on gangs of fellow hooligans in places like Tranmere (where most of the population are "on smack or mobility scooters"), or Yeovil.
Is he still relevant? Is it pathetic that a middle-aged wide-boy still gets his kicks from getting high and beating others to a pulp? Well, the answer to the latter is seemingly a resounding yes.
Jack knows that he’s past it. "My optics are all wrong," he mutters to himself, shortly before he collapses in a Portaloo following too much cocaine. But can a man like that change?
Danny Dyer in Marching Powder. True Brit Entertainment
Love doesn’t exactly offer us much evidence that Jack has the will to turn his life around. Nor does he convincingly show why Dani – who tries to go back to art college, to fulfil her dream – would want to stay with him.
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No question, Love has an amusing turn of phrase, and there are some zingers here ("As welcome as Andrew Tate at the Ipswich lesbians’ annual vegan lunch"; "About as appealing as sitting on Gary Glitter’s lap"), as long as you’re broad-minded.
The film also shows the occasional innovation, such as the opening preamble – an animated sequence that gets us acquainted with the hedonistic Jack and his chums. But too often, Love relies on dropping c-bombs – a tiresome linguistic lark that grows less shocking by the second.
Intriguingly, the film comes produced by Rockstar Games, the enormous video game company behind both Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption (Jack’s boy can even be glimpsed playing the latter).
Certainly, the outlandish violence and drug-taking seems to fit with Rockstar’s output, not to mention the humour – notably a scene where Jack finds employment in a Shoreditch coffee bar, serving hipsters pains au chocolat, which feels like the kind of mockery that sits well in the GTA series.
Dyer, as ever, is a likeable presence – even getting his own speech at the end that feels like a riff on Renton’s classic "choose life" monologue in Trainspotting. The rest of the characters are caricatures and cutouts, but at least Love here is attempting to analyse the Football Factory-like yobs he once lionised, asking if this life of perpetual nastiness is sustainable.
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No doubt, this will be a smash hit with those who fancy a bit of post-pub ultra-violence and anti-woke giggles. For the rest, it’s like a kick in the knackers.
Authors
James Mottram
James Mottram is a London-based film critic, journalist, and author.
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