06/09/07 - Rise of the Footsoldier
Kevin Maher
The Times

The product of the film-making brothers Julian and William Gilbey, Rise of the Footsoldier is an allegedly true era-spanning story of a football thug, Carlton Leech (Ricci Harnett), and his rise from terrace terrier to Essex gangster kingpin. It is so derivative as to be almost meaningless.

Like a strange, slipshod pastiche of everything from Scorsese to Guy Ritchie to Nick Love, the movie boasts a grating, self-aggrandising voiceover that’s forever providing superfluous tidbits such as: “If I caught you noncing in the toilets I wouldn’t think twice about knifing you up the a***.”

It has a deadeningly repetitive penchant for shaky-cam fight scenes, a leering depiction of women as masochistic sex toys, and a blank and seemingly rapacious appetite for gore. “This was torture, Turkish style,” announces Leech halfway through. You said it, geezer.