Truly Dyer: The brutal, boozy brilliance of the British football hooligan movie

Once regarded as ‘worthless’ by broadsheet critics, the low-budget football hooligan film is finally being celebrated inside the hallowed halls of the British Film Institute. Geoffrey Macnab asks whether these Danny Dyer-filled thrillers should have been embraced all along

Come on then if you think you’re hard enough: Danny Dyer in the seminal hooligan movie ‘The Football Factory’ (Vertigo Films/Kobal/Shutterstock)

It used to be open season among film critics when it came to football hooligan movies. The violent attack endured by Danny Dyer in the opening images of Nick Love’s The Football Factory (2004) was nothing compared to the verbal punishment metered out on it by broadsheet reviewers. Likewise, Lexi Alexander’s Green Street Hooligans (2005), its star Charlie Hunnam coshed repeatedly by critics for having the worst East End accent since Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins.

Hooligan pictures have long been castigated for their misogyny and mindless violence. “Irresponsible, ill-timed and risible,” fulminated The Guardian about The Football Factory. “Staggeringly appalling” and “a colossal misstep at every turn” were among the responses from British reviewers to Green Street Hooligans. “A redundant compendium of blokeish clichés,” sneered the Daily Mail about the 2009 remake of Gary Oldman’s hooligan movie The Firm. The same reporter described the genre as a whole as “worthless”, and one that could only appeal to the “mentally infirm.”

Most of these films did patchy business at the box office, but subsequently became huge successes on DVD. They came out in the UK at a time when lads’ mags were selling in their droves. Many of their characters – played by the likes of genre stalwarts Dyer, Tamer Hassan and Leo Gregory – became cult figures. There was an obvious overlap between the hooligan pictures of the era and a new wave of low-budget British gangster movies led by films such as Essex Boys (2000) and Rise of the Footsoldier (2007), many of which were equally detested by mainstream critics. These films in turn spawned a sub-genre of TV documentaries, several fronted by Dyer, about the “real football factories” of the UK, as well as Britain’s “hardest” or “deadliest” men.