"Marching Powder" - Review

Jack (Danny Dyer) was once a likely lad, a cocky young hooligan big shot with few ambitions beyond getting annihilated off of cocaine and alcohol with his mates, getting into fights, and being a general menace. But now 45, fatter, balder and irrelevant, that may be coming to an end: arrested for a weekend brawl, Jack is given 6 weeks to turn his life around, win back the love of his wife Dani (Stephanie Leonidas) and figure out where he goes from here. Complicating matters are a crippling cocaine habit, toxic loser mates, an even worse father in law, a brother in law fresh from a mental health facility he has to look after, and the possilbe realisation that maybe he just fucking sucks.

It's going to be Marmite: it's a Danny Dyer film directed by Nick Love. Every second word is a profanity, its humour juvenile, crass and vulgar, and it focuses on lads doing lad things. It's not normally my sort of thing: most of Nick Love's work has done well to remain firmly in the 2000s (except that clip of him and Dyer promoting "Outlaw", that's timeless peak "Spinal Tap"), and going back to it is the weirdest British time capsule, even if there's stuff to love and respect about them (except "Outlaw", that is still the bad kind of throwback). Having the film be an older Danny Dyer and Nick Love in a throwback, in this day and age, is actually kind of inspired, and I appreciated that angle of it. I'm inclined to say that I enjoy this, erring on the side of respecting it. For all its faults (it still has that juvenile "lads" sense of humour, and very much wants to have its cake and eat it regard to the "coolness" of drugs and alcohol and the football hooliganism) it manages to have just enough self awareness to work. Jack understands that he is too old for this and is out of touch, and the film keeps reminding us that his "wacky" supporting mates are vile, festering dead ends and toxic rejects from society; and then it will also have few sharper things to say about how the sneering classism and unpleasantness has merely warped and twisted itself into new shells and forms (there's also a great racism joke at an art painting class, deftly showing the "middle class, progressive" racism angle). The sub plot of the "mental" brother in law feels like an afterthought, thought it has a sweet little payoff halfway through (though does keep going after that...), and the hooliganism plotline is a B-plot shadow of previous better versions of it like "Green Street", "The Firm", "The Football Factory" and even a bit of "I.D"; it's almost perfunctory in that regard and honestly could maybe have been cut (though there's a good scene in a pub when a rival comes in looking for confrontation and Jack has to bluff with his barman). I do appreciate that Dani wasn't a mere plot point or hollow empty facsimile of a character, and had actual dreams, ideas and an arc and personality. It's a low bar, true, but still a sign that people have learned that maybe women are people too, and Stephanie Leonidas is great in this. Dyer's excellent too, I've always liked Danny Dyer, here he goes a bit "Filth" and "Trainspotting", with some truly vulgar and funny lines and moments, in between darker asides to the camera and little sprinklings of societal commentary. It's not as dark as something like "Filth" (watch "Filth"), but it doesn't truly need to be: it's trying to be a movie for the lads lads lads football crowd who grew up with Nick Love's stuff. It earns its happy ending in between its swipes and jabs, though the aforementioned vulgar humour and crude mayhem is pure Marmite. It is happy wallowing in and celebrating its protagonist with some honestly good encapsulation of working class nihilism and self destruction.