Starring: Jason Maza, Nick Nevern, Ray Fearon
For as long as he could remember, Danny (Billy Matthews, Maza) wanted to be a football hooligan, inspired by his extremely violent father (Ronnie Fox). Now an adult, Danny finds himself without a home and forms a bond with Dex (Nevern), a legend within the hooligan community. With the help of Dex's old firm, Danny rides his way to the top of the hooligan ladder.
A small British comedy about football hooliganism, The Hooligan Factory is the second time as director for Nick Nevern. Judging from this film, Nevern may not be amongst Britain's best and brightest of a new generation of filmmakers but does show ability. The thing is the ultimate result is...uneven.
The Hooligan Factory is clearly trying to style itself, comedically, as a Scorsese film of the terraces. There's some clear alluding to Goodfellas (1990) (although in an odd move, the film parodies Goodfellas directly twice rather than going for a more natural single parody or a film-long one) but the editing and pace owes something to Scorsese as well. Hooligan Factory has some definite energy and intensity, especially in the early going and there are some truly funny moments and good performances.
However, there are problems. For all that the film does make some amusing jokes towards the hooligan culture and how it has changed, there's a deep thread of humour throughout that seems to show a fixation of women getting physically harmed. Once would not attract much notice, It probably still wouldn't be funny, but it wouldn't attract much notice a d whilst attacking the film as misogynist may be a bit extreme, it's attitude does come off as a little disturbing. Again, this may have been a Scorsese influence, showing not particularly nice people but not being didactic about their flaws, but it comes off as very misguided.
The Hooligan Factory just simply lacks direction. It lampoons the laddish, violent and often unpleasant world of the subject matter and yet seems to relish at times in the kind of humour that is equally tasteless and hateful whilst the narrative also gets confused. There's no real sense of how long the events of the story take place over and an opening scene seems to serve little purpose other than to say, "Hey, look! We got Danny Dyer!". I defend this film by saying that beneath it all, there's a very intelligent movie. It's a shame it's being blocked by a meat-headed thug with a warped sense of humour.
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