Marching Powder

21 years after The Football Factory (2004) established Nick Love and the football hooligan genre in cinema, Marching Powder marks his return to familiar grounds. Jack (Danny Dyer), a washed-up ex-football thug with a cocaine habit, is given six weeks by the courts to prove he deserves a second chance. Instead of prison, he is forced into a different kind of rehabilitation: repairing his marriage to Dani (Stephanie Leonidas), mentoring his wayward brother-in-law Kenny Boy (Calum McNab) and convincing his sceptical father-in-law to give him a job.

Whereas The Football Factory swaggered through a world of young male tribalism, Marching Powder depicts the subculture as a relic of the past. Jack’s middle age is relentlessly emphasised – he is not just a man out of time but one whose mind, body and relationships are collapsing under the weight of his excesses. Love provides endless scenes of ageing men shouting in pubs, slurring through cocaine highs, sloppily brawling behind stadiums, and desperately trying to relive a youth that has long abandoned them. Yet, for all its supposed grittiness, the film often wallows in nostalgia and overindulgence rather than truly interrogating them.

Dyer, still the poster boy for Love’s brand of hyper-masculinity, delivers a performance tinged with exhaustion. Jack clings to the bravado of his younger self, but his temperament is dulled by years of self-destruction. His relationship with Kenny Boy is the movie’s most compelling dynamic – here is a man who knows exactly where this path leads, trying in vain to steer someone else away. Yet, even this subplot feels underdeveloped, as if Love is more interested in portraying the cycle of self-destruction than exploring it.

Unfortunately, Love’s approach to themes outside of men like Jack, drugs and football, proves lacking. Dani sacrificed her art school dreams to build a life with Jack, yet Love’s resolution is laughably simplistic: she simply re-enrols, as though two decades of lost aspirations can be erased with a single move. Meanwhile, a bizarre scene featuring a cartoonishly bigoted hipster in a Shoreditch coffee shop feels equally misplaced, serving as a misguided attempt to portray Jack and his peers as victims of modern Britain.

Despite its flaws, Marching Powder is a more sombre, self-aware entry in Love’s filmography. Whereas his 2000s work revelled in the heedless aggression of youth, Marching Powder is the inevitable hangover. Yet, rather than confronting the past with the weight of time and insight, it plays out like a weary retread – one that fails to generate any real interest in the wreckage it attempts to revisit.

Christina Yang

Marching Powder is released nationwide on 7^th March 2025.

Watch the trailer for Marching Powder here: