The Football Factory
Ingredients: A cup of Trainspotting, a tablespoon of Fight Club, a teaspoon of Human Traffic, and a pinch of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. Mix thoroughly and bake in a hot oven for 94 minutes, then cut into small pieces. Result: a tasty little number called The Football Factory.
The Football Factory is the story of Tommy Johnson (Danny Dyer, Human Traffic), an English football hooligan. Tommy has a job, but no career. He has a best mate, but no girlfriend and no aspirations. None, that is, beyond getting drunk, drugged, and laid – and beating the shit out of the supporters of rival clubs.
Tommy and his mates are stuck in a perpetual adolescence. They live in a simple world in which they're concerned only with satisfying their most immediate urges. Beyond this cycle of appetite and gratification, they display precious little that passes for thought of any kind. Excluded from many advantages by class and education, they glory in their own crassness, exaggerating it into a badge of honour. What gives their otherwise empty lives meaning isn't country, culture or family, but football. More precisely, it's the vicious paramilitary gang of Chelsea supporters to which Tommy and his mates belong, because the football is a pretext, as is who and why they're fighting. What's really important is that the fighting binds them together, giving them a sense of purpose, community, and even family that they otherwise lack.
Tommy's grandfather, a crusty WWII veteran, is the film's Greek chorus. He observes Tommy's antics disapprovingly and offers, along with a former hooligan of Tommy's acquaintance, the only sensible, recognisably adult voice in the film. The grandfather's role as counterpoint is a little overdone and lacking in subtlety, though his sequences are a welcome relief to all the brassy, bovverboy imbecility that fills the rest of the film.
Perhaps it's doing The Football Factory a disservice to define it solely in terms of its influences. That said, it's hard not to when so much of it seems like a pastiche of many other (primarily British) films of the last 15 years. Like Fight Club, it's a film about men who seek self-realisation through violence. Like Trainspotting, it's frenetic and self-conscious and comes with a laddish voice-over, not to mention a startling knack for juxtaposing the abject and the absurd. Like Human Traffic, it has a hammering soundtrack and a cast of characters who answer weekday dissatisfaction with weekend decadence. And like Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, it's thick with matter-of-fact brutality.
Director Nick Love has an engaging, if heavy-handed, style. The action is fast, well filmed, and occasionally funny. But it's a pity that, having raised such an important subject, he reserves all his relish for its symptoms and not its causes.
-- Hans Fruck
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