The Football Factory

A Fantastic Movie from start to finish, with brilliant acting, script, dialogue, poignancy and laughs. Danny Dyer proves that there is more to young British Actors that Jude "Pretty Boy" Law and Orlando "acts with his eyes" Bloom with a stirring performance as Tommy Johnston. The social critique is as prominent in the film as the football hooliganism, and the bathos that runs throughout is definitely a strong point. The Film is similar to Trainspotting in its feel and story-telling style, and the soundtrack expertly tries to give you the buzz the guys are feeling as they are marching towards a ruck. Scenes to look out for are the Junior Football Match, the 3rd Round Draw, and Rod Meeting his girlfriend's parents. Ultimately the film asks more questions about the society that breeds the need for arranged violence than the actual link to football, and ultimately leaves you on a high note after many lows during the film.

I would recommend this to anyone, not just football fans, but anyone who wishes to see a film out heterosexual male relationships, and the state of the British Male mindset in the year 2004.

Love It!!

Being German I'm not really into the Hooligan way of life. I'm just fond of the Brit way of making films and this one is just brilliant. Of course you can argue about whether the director Nick Love is showing the life of some football thugs too positive and without the "never do this, kids" attitude, but...this is just a great piece of film. It has terrific acting (especially Frank Harper does a great job), splendid camera and editing and a more than suiting soundtrack. Watched it with some pals and it was just great fun. The scene where Rod tells his girlfriend's parents about his inner thoughts is a highlight. So if you're able to shut out all thoughts of moral and you're just interested in 90 minutes of quality film-making of today...watch this. It's definitely all worth it!

The Football Factory is movie about football (soccer) fans. Since they seem to be more interested in fighting than in actually watching the games this is certainly no sports film so don't let the title fool you. It's also based upon a novel that I haven't even heard of, but that could perhaps be because I'm in Sweden.

The Football Factory is a very episodic movie. Mostly it works, but sometimes I felt like I wanted to spend more time with main character Tommy Johnson or that they should at least had focused on fewer characters. Sometimes I felt that a scene was working really well, but the story quickly focused on other things. As I said, more often than not the episodic feel works fine, but not all the time.

As in almost all English movies the acting's great. From minor characters to main characters... they feel real. I especially think the voice over sounds very authentic: it's Tommy speaking, not actor Danny Dryer reading.

I think this is a good movie, it's rather violent and upsetting at times, but also funny and entertaining.

Hoologanism in football has been an controversial over past decade or so especially with it is concerned with English fans. This film has presented this dilemma quite well and in style as most British films do these days. Danny Dyer is brilliant, the last film i saw him in was Human Traffic. There is some terrific dialogue in this film... definitely one of the better football films to be released. I never knew Dyer voiced in some GTA games, how interesting. This film takes on no real plot (except for Chelsea's fixture list) which didn't really bother because it reflects a culture not a 'storyline'. British films never cease to amaze me, the acting is brilliant and script are always so clever and hilarious.

Although the film was good, it scared the hell out of me at times... the reality of it. Watching and thinking that this really does happen every weekend, I guess that is the intention of Nick Love. As a football fan and someone who has never experienced the full wrath of football hooliganism, i throroughly enjoyed and recommend it to anyone who is wondering whether to watch it or not.

MY VERDICT: **/*****

The logic resulting in the production of this film is not hard to follow. The scathing social satire and searingly counter-cultural Trainspotting was a brilliant British film. The flash-talking, fast-plotted, gun-wielding, hard-brawling Lock Stock was a good British film. So why not combine aspects of both? Predictably, the result is a mess, but flashes of good film-making keep the viewer interested for the 1 hour and 20 minutes or so of football 'n' fights.

The opening sequence closely follows the Trainspotting format. A narrator, later we discover called Tommy, delivers his criticism on how we live our lives and how he has found excitement and meaning by flying right off the rails. The soundtrack moves from one Brit hit to the next as we are introduced to his gang in some snappy montages. Again, the Trainspotting skool of film-making isn't so much an influence as a screenplay, storyboard and script.

Soon, we get to know the gang, and learn that the love of their lives is violence, especially (but not exclusively) surrounding their football team, Chelsea, and particularly focused against their arch-rivals Millwall. I was preparing myself for some gruesome violence as geezers started drinking pints and looking for a fight. And then, the film ... just ... chickens out. A film which is supposedly about football violence should, um, contain some football violence maybe, but Football Factory becomes a film version of one of its thugs - all bluster and intimidation, and no bite. Supposedly hard-hitting action sequences have soap opera-like qualities. Never do we seem to see a fist connect in anger, or teeth shatter, or bones crack. Just some bad pantomime blood and incompetent camera-work. This inadequacy seriously undermines the film's impact - it fails to pump up the audience to the next big fight, and thus has no discernible pace. Just scenes, shots and cuts.

Instead, the focus of the film falls (rather disastrously) on the uninteresting, homogenous characters. With a sigh, I realized this wasn't going to get any better, and began to take mental notes of names, story lines etc so I could at least follow the plot. Tommy and Rod are the central duo, the thugs with brains, imagination, and perhaps the insight that will lift them out of this life. Bill is meant to be the ultra-nasty psycho - Robert Carlyle in Trainspotting was clearly what they were trying to emulate - but some unconvincing acting gives him all the terror of a particularly in-your-face door to door salesman. Zebedee is there for exposition on the cocaine-fuelled lifestyle that all youths supposedly lead (is this true? I was a teenager for years, and I never remember being offered cocaine.) There's also an organised violence ringleader, although I don't have to worry about his name because he brings absolutely nothing to the plot at all.

In brief, the plot follows the gang on the buildup to a particularly bruising clash - Millwall versus Chelsea, and particularly how Tommy begins to get cold feet about his thuggery and starts considering his options. This isn't helped by some heavy-handedly (almost bludgeoningly) symbolic dream sequences. I quite liked the film-making device of giving no warning or visual clues to as what was a dream and what wasn't. It's not put to an ultimate good use though, much like the rest of the handful or so of original ideas in the film. I like the dope-smoking old men though.

So is this worth viewing or not? Certainly, it's got more to chew on than another awful CGI-overkill-marathon like Van Helsing or Catwoman. But don't expect it to truly open your eyes to another world, or indeed, still be with you a month later.