It didn't strike me the first time, but I can now see it for the modern classic it is

Rating: 10/10 (11 January 2010)

STAR RATING: ***** Saturday Night **** Friday Night *** Friday Morning ** Sunday Night * Monday Morning
In what were still the early noughties, Nick Love sparked what was to be a string of football violence related movies of the decade with this high energy, hard hitting exploration of male culture and the lure of the crowd, and in turn provided star making turns for both himself and lead actor Danny Dyer.
From the opening credits, The Football Factory hammers your senses and drags you in for the ride with it's high tempo soundtrack interspersed with the various headlines of the scourge of football hooliganism, a style it will keep up through-out the rest of the film. The film is aiming for your face and brilliantly uses a heavy beat soundtrack to drag it along through-out. It gained more attention for it's controversy because of it's violence and mind blowing amount of bad language than for any stand out performances, in much the same way Alan Clarke's TV drama The Firm did two decades before it.
Like Trainspotting, there is no 'plot' as such, it more just follows hooligan Tommy (Dyer) about with his gang as he begins to suffer nightmares and question his means of releasing his pent up energy, whilst a big clash with Millwall looms on the horizon. But this doesn't detract from it's startling, raw intensity and intense delving into the minds of men looking for armies to join. Dyer cemented himself as the Ray Winstone of his generation with his 'cockney geezer' persona, with his own cult film on the same level Winstone gained his notoriety for his role in Scum. Special note must also be made to Frank Harper as Billy Bright, an ageing hooligan who can't grow up or accept he will never be top dog, Roland Manookian as drug addled low life Zeberdee and Dudley Sutton as Old Man Farrell, the closest to a sane, law abiding head among all these repressed hot heads.
Yes, the film is filled with mostly undesirable characters who are the kind most of us would want to keep a million miles away from in real life. But only the most faint hearted of us would find their violence too much and only the most weak minded would want to imitate it. As a nosedive into this world and as a study of why they do it, TFF is the best film of it's sort all decade, with the energy, intensity and killer soundtrack to make it accessible to a modern audience. It's only a shame I couldn't appreciate it on as many levels as it deserved the first time I saw it. *****