Alicia I love this movie so much

Steinesongo Too many fans seem to be blown away

Inadvands Boring, over-political, tech fuzed mess

Asad Almond A clunky actioner with a handful of cool moments.

jadavix "The Football Factory" is a passable, entertaining movie about football thugs. It does not absurdly glamourise this moronic pass-time like "Green Street Hooligans", which expected us to be taken in by the culture of violence as its miscast hero was. It does, however, wallow in the muck a bit much, and it doesn't provide much of a reason for its hero's involvement in this horrible business.Furthermore, the punchy style, with its quick, in your face editing, blaring soundtrack of recognizable bands, pugnacious voice-over, title cards, blink and you miss them flashback sequences, all combine to keep you at a distance from the protagonist. This is the style you expect from a British movie about the working classes, but by 2004 it was looking a little tired. It jazzes up the material, and is that really necessary? Do the creators love the violent lifestyle, or condemn it? They clearly do not wish to merely depict it, there's too much staging for that.Danny Dyer is also miscast. He is introduced at the beginning of the movie as a typical young hoodlum. He doesn't look, or even really act, like one. There is some nonsense about him having recurring dreams that don't really add anything to the movie, or the character. After all the noise, swearing, violence and mayhem, they don't make enough of an impact to really justify their presence.The movie is still watchable, it's just really not anything great.

samandyjohn For me , Love's emergence as an auteur represents a watershed moment for early twenty-first century British cinema. After the storms of Leigh and Loach have mellowed in recent years, the public awaited , day by day, hour by hour, anxious for a new cinematic messiah to ease their collective cultural consciousness, and to provide adequate imagery for the post thatcher years. I believe the dyer/love collaboration will eventually bear fruit similar to the cross continental greatness of de niro and scorsese, and this visceral, intellectually and emotionally engaging picture will convince others of the revolution of minds love is clearly pursuing.

davideo-2 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. *****

jmbellin Many will want to know how this compares to Green Street Hooligans. The two stories are handled quite differently. The Football Factory has almost a black comic feel to it. GSH is really the story of one young man's descent into a violent environment and is an emotional drama. TFF has more of the rhythm of a machine gun, with a, great, very high energy music soundtrack keeping it pulsate along the way.Perhaps not as emotionally deeply felt as GSH, TFF keeps you in the thoughts and feelings of those in the gang. It makes it much harder to feel empathy for its characters (as each of them are all aware and enjoy the catharticism of the violent lifestyle), yet incredibly you do. The fact that it also is also very funny in an intended ironic way (much in the way that the protagonist in Sunset Boulevard narrates the story already having already been murdered), this film has that same knowing irony that also keeps the film bubbling.I really enjoyed the ride in this one.