07/09/07 - Rise of the Footsoldier
David Gritten reviews British gangster movie Rise of the Footsoldier
Telegraph
Rise of the Footsoldier 18 cert, 119 min

The British gangster movie is a genre one never expected to be enjoying a mini-revival this soon. It was discredited around 2000 by a surfeit of utterly wretched examples: Rancid Aluminium, Essex Boys, Circus, It Was an Accident. Some of us still flinch on hearing the words Love, Honour and Obey in a single sentence.

Yet here comes Rise of the Footsoldier, based on a memoir by former gang member and all-round hard case Carlton Leach. An unapologetic two hours in length, it aims in vain for epic stature, tracing his career through three decades. Leach (Ricci Harnett) began as a West Ham-supporting soccer hooligan in the 1970s: the queasy violence between rival fans in its early scenes thus sustains another unlovable genre.

Leach's progress, if that's the right word, involves a stint as a violent club bouncer, dalliances with various drugs and anabolic steroids, witnessing sundry murderous acts and eventually graduating to a real gang. All this feels familiar on two counts. Three of his mobster friends were found dead in a car in deserted Essex woodland in 1995, an event that also inspired the film Essex Boys.

But more crucially, Rise of the Footsoldier owes a painfully clear debt to Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas. It's there in the voice-over, in the testimony about evil deeds by a bit-player. But, while Scorsese made telling points about the simultaneous attraction and repulsion of the wise-guy lifestyle, delicately placing it in a social context, director Julian Gilbey and his brother William, who co-scripted, shed no light beyond tirades of half-baked, foul-mouthed rants.

If there's an award for the most frequent use of the c-word on film this year, Rise of the Footsoldier wins hands down. And the marginal nature of Leach's part in this story becomes comical: at its climax, he's reduced to hearing bad news from the other end of a phone line. In the large cast, women exist solely to be abused, slapped about or used as sexual playthings by these feral boy-men. (They include Kierston Wareing, a marvellous actress who stars in the new Ken Loach film It's a Free World…, who is utterly wasted here.)

Distastefully, the Gilbeys fetishise firearms (the bigger the better), macho strutting and rage-fuelled mayhem. This ugly, dim-witted film will appeal to those teenage boys toting guns on our sink estates; they may even find it inspirational. I hope its distributors can live with that thought.