Marching Powder review – a proper, proper gaffe

Remember football hooligans? Remember lad culture? Remember when blokes were blokes and women knew their place? Remember binge drinking and hoovering up endless lines of Class As and going on the rampage with the boys? Remember having it large and giving it some and sticking two fingers up to the bullshit nanny-state political correctness-gone-mad fun police?

This is the faintly familiar milieu of the latest low-rent Brit flick from writer/director Nick Love, which sees him reunite with his old mucker Danny Dyer for the first time in almost two decades. Dyer plays Jack: part-time nutter, full-time fuck-up; lousy father to JJ (Dyer’s real-life son, Arty) and an even worse husband to Dani (Stephanie Leonidas). One day, Jack’s cosy life of lower-league street fights and cocaine-fuelled nights out is upended when he’s hauled in front of the local magistrate.

Jack has two weeks to prove to everyone that he can stay on the straight and narrow. But he’s effectively given a free pass by an implausibly lenient probation officer and is soon up to his old tricks, much to the aggravation of his long-suffering spouse and his menacing father-in-law (Geoff Bell). Jack’s last shot at redemption comes in the unlikely form of his neurodivergent, severely bowl-cutted brother-in-law, Kenny Boy (Calum MacNab), for whose well-being he is reluctantly placed in charge. Jack being Jack, even that seems beyond him.

Having adopted a more family-friendly image en route to achieving national treasure status, Dyer’s decision to revive the violent caricature that defined much of his early career is a strange one. There’s no doubt he still possesses that same unmistakable swagger, that same cheeky glint in his eye. Yet there’s something missing this time around: the rough edges that once made his characters so compelling and unpredictable have been smoothed out, his personal brand of machismo noticeably blunted.

More to the point, not even Dyer’s boyish charm and undeniable screen presence – when he does manage to recapture the raw intensity that made him a star in the first place – can redeem Love’s rancid script, which reads like a ransom note assembled by a man responsible for his own intellectual and moral kidnapping, using characters and symbols torn exclusively from the pages of Nuts magazine.

If that strikes you as a rather outdated cultural reference, it’s one that is entirely fitting for a film made by someone who rose to notoriety during the early to mid-2000s – a time when being crass, cruel and ultra cynical was de rigeur, and what passed for mass entertainment would often involve punching down for pure shock value.

And that’s exactly what Love does here – taking cheap shots at virtually everyone who doesn’t identify as straight, white, male and British. This includes, but is by no means limited to, gay people, immigrants, alcoholics, the homeless, sex workers, drug addicts, fat people, people with dyslexia, the unemployed, trans people, victims of sexual abuse, vegans, people with bipolar disorder, and women. For Love, the Nasty Noughties never really ended.

Of course, this is all couched in broadly comedic, loosely satirical terms – a purported send-up of a particularly narrow worldview in which sneering bigotry is passed off as cheery banter. At the risk of coming across as the kind of sandal-wearing, soy latte-drinking lefty snowflake the film so gleefully ridicules, the greater issue as far as Love is concerned is that Marching Powder isn’t worth getting upset over, simply because it is so unserious and, ultimately, insignificant.

Like the film’s sweary, substance-abusing protagonist, Love is a man out of time in more ways than one. Even the sympathetic, once ubiquitous mainstream media boosters for this sort of film – think weekly lads’ mags and Soccer AM – have become obsolete. The Football Factory, The Business and The Firm found their audiences largely through these platforms. As such, it’s hard to see how Marching Powder will do the same.

Still, Love insists on playing the same old tin-earned hits. Unwilling to change his tune. Unable to kick the habit. There he goes again, raging against the dying of the lager-hazed light. There’s an argument to be made that the return of Nick Love is a reflection of where we are now as a society. In truth, though, Marching Powder is neither interesting nor relevant enough to warrant being discussed within a wider cultural or socioeconomic context.

It is, per Jack’s anti-woke tirade towards the end of the film, a staggeringly ill-judged exercise in self-aggrandisement, predicated on worn-out ideas and attitudes that are at best intolerant and at worst irresponsible. A desperate attempt to convince anyone prepared to listen that this is what “real” working-class audiences want. A failed bid to recapture those faded glory years. An angry shout into the middle-age void.

Remember when Billy got stuck into their mob? Remember when Tommy smashed that bird’s back doors in? Remember when Bex carved up that poor sod with a Stanley knife? Please? Remember us?