Posts Tagged ‘The Football Factory (2004)’
Author: Colin
Not hard enough
With very few films set around football hooliganism having ever been made (The Firm (1988), ID (1995), The Football Factory (2004) and Green Street (2005) are all that leap to mind), there’s not much of a body of work to compare Cass (2008) to.
Author: Colin
Bloody meetings
I was genuinely surprised to note that this film was not a big hit. While being a far cry from the best movie ever committed to celluloid, it is a very competent, savvy bit of film-making.
Directed by Chris Smith (Creep (2004)), it has a ‘comedy-horror’ tag attributed to it – probably by the film’s marketing people, as they were almost certainly trying to hitch a ride on the Shaun of the Dead (2004) bandwagon, the films being released in the same year. Yes, it’s funny in quite a few places, and the humour varies in style. It’s sometimes based on the casual banter of a British office worker, while at other times more macabre. What it isn’t, however, is Shaun of the Dead – so please don’t go into it thinking that, or you may very well come away disappointed.
Author: James
Kicking
Without doubt, the central characters in writer-director Nick Love’s seminal study of football/violence-related male bonding, The Football Factory, would give me a good kicking for the poncey review that follows.
Similar treatment would doubtless be dished out by the real-life ‘gentlemen of the terraces’, whose Saturday mass-brawls inspired the John King novel from which this electrifying insight into the psyche of displaced masculine identity was adapted.
Author: Colin
London brawling
Welcome to being Tommy Johnson. His is a world of dead-end jobs, no prospects and an uncertain future. His story is set out pretty well in his opening voiceover: “There’s nothing different about me. I’m just another bored male, approaching 30, in a dead-end job, who lives for the weekend. Casual sex, watered-down lager, heavily cut drugs. And occasionally kicking fuck out of someone.”
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