davideo-2
STAR RATING: ***** Saturday Night **** Friday Night *** Friday Morning ** Sunday Night * Monday Morning A re-make of the 1988 TV play with Paul Anderson taking over Gary Oldman's original role as Bex, the property agent whose buzz in life is being the head boy of The West Ham Firm. Young upstart Dom (Calum McNab) and his friend try to challenge his authority in a nightclub, but are soon put on the spot and made to issue a grovelling apology. But Bex takes a shine to Dom and invites him to join his army...but as events go on, it becomes more and more clear how Bex's drive for his 'buzz' has pushed him over the edge.I'd been expecting an adaptation of The Sweeney to be Nick Love's next filmic venture, but instead this re-make of Alan Clarke's original TV film has arrived. It's still set in the 80s but nostalgia for that era is the main decent thing you take away from this film.There's no drive to this version of The Firm, no 'oompth' or real wow factor. It may be that the 'football hooligan' movie has been done to death and everything's a bit too predictable, but the tracksuits the main characters wear are the most colourful thing about the film. It's like a joyless version of The Football Factory, with nowhere near as much energy or real raw power to it. The clashes between the rival firms, separated as best as they can by the police on patrol, have a realistic air of disorder and lack of control to them but there's no really juicy bust ups to any of it. The film sort of just ambles along with no real narrative flow or direction, and with a distinct lack of fun or excitement to the proceedings.Performances wise, rising star Daniel Mays feels wasted as Bex's sworn enemy Yeti, whilst as the man himself Anderson gives no real power to the role. He must have known he'd have to pull off a miracle to deliver anything even close to Oldman's raw intensity, but even if you don't expect too much you feel short changed.The one thing it can boast is a reliably decent 80s soundtrack. But you get the feeling Love might be starting to take himself a bit too seriously and could end up alienating the fan boys who first got him noticed. **
Ali Catterall
Here's a Nick Love joke: two teenage boys are leaning against a wall. One says to the other, "I should stick a Tampax in you." "Why?" "Cos you're a c***." If you enjoyed that, here's another joke for you: Nick Love's The Firm - a remake of the late Alan Clarke's final film, the only good drama about British football hooliganism ever produced. Just check out Green Street, I.D. or Love's own The Football Factory if you're unsure about that.In Gary Oldman's Clive 'Bex' Bissell, Clarke's 1988 original features one of the all-time great screen villains: an upwardly mobile Loadsamoney with a sociology A-level and a Stanley knife. Reaping the benefits of the Lawson boom, this sociopathic estate agent and family man is seen to be a breed apart from the stereotyped bovver boy of the previous decade But The Firm isn't only a superb character study. Above all, it's a damning indictment of grass roots Thatcherism turned brutal, tribal and nationalistic. Bex's baseball bat-wielding Inter City Firm is just the flip side of an altogether more ruthless and democratically elected 'firm'. For Bex, Trigger and Snowy read Thatcher, Tebbit and Hesseltine.So, given the class, calibre and integrity of Clarke's output - and given Nick Love's - we haven't felt such a sinking feeling about a remake since Neil LaBute released The Wicker Man Mark II. A reaction the director himself anticipates: "I know there is an element of cynical people who are taking issue with the fact I've remade The Firm." It's a fair cop, Nick. "But I'm hoping there's enough of a different angle and that we've taken this into different territory." You mean a territory that isn't populated by geezers, gangsters and a string of 1980s club hits? Ah.Love's version backdates the action to 1984, a few years earlier than the original. So out go the quiffs and stripy yuppie shirts, and in come wedge-cuts and sportswear: a day-glo riot of Fila tracksuits, Adidas trainers, Pringle jumpers and Tacchini tops. The kind of clobber 17-year-old Dominic (Calum McNab) eagerly sports in his infatuated attempts to please West Ham firm leader Bex (Paul Anderson). The hapless lad is soon pitched into the violent world of Saturday turf wars with old rivals Millwall, discovering the hard way that what might look exciting on telly is acutely painful in real life.Love has dutifully re-staged a few key scenes from the original. The rest is fat; less a remake of Alan Clarke even, than a Football Factory rematch. Certainly, the entire point of Clarke's drama is anathema to the director. "I think if you get bogged down in the politics behind it all, it would play less as entertainment," he says. Instead, to please multiplex audiences, "which is what I'm aiming this at, you've got to have big fight scenes and lots of loud music".Thus, deliberately shorn of any socio-political context (although the West Ham-Millwall kick-up of August 2009 has been an unfortunately well-timed gift, promotion-wise), this shallow and pointless remake settles for rehashing Love's single idea, familiar from his previous three pictures, in which a young, weedy, working-class guy gets sucked into a violently glamorous world led by a charismatic father figure who eventually turns round and bites him, before our hero escapes with a few scrapes and bruises. Whatever demons the former middle-class rude boy is trying to exorcise, he clearly hasn't achieved catharsis yet. This is less The Firm than 'The Formula'.In between, there's the usual wooden performances, self-consciously laddish dialogue, and a certain colloquial diarrhea; having a garishly-dressed casual described as looking like "a f****** fruit pastille" is funny the first time, but to subsequently hear every permutation of it ("like a liquorice all-sort"; "like a post box"; "like John McEnroe") gets really tedious, really quickly.The film would also like to be patted on the back for its attention to 1980s detail, as if including Kool And The Gang songs and old 'TV AM' clips, or peopling gritty estates that have looked exactly the same for the past 25 years with a bunch of Diadora-wearing goons makes a brilliantly convincing time capsule on its own. Love's box-ticking period films are the equivalent of those retro CD box sets ('Now That's What I Call Exxon Valdez'), flogged in their millions to nostalgic forty somethings who've apparently forgotten just how rancid the 1980s actually were. The music may be authentic, and the typeface spot-on, but the atmosphere just isn't there.Given its director's claims to abhor violence, The Firm also broadcasts some extremely mixed messages: over some soppy piano chords, we're invited to feel sorry for Bex and Co after they and their motors take a battering. Not because they're pathetic. But because they lost a fight. Still, to his credit, Love's pretty good at choreographing simmering hostility, those nervy moments before everything kicks off. And while he's no Oldman, Paul Anderson is decent enough as the ferrety Bex, albeit with a severely reduced range. But Daniel Mays, so good in Shifty, is badly miscast as rival firm leader Yeti. Sporting albino locks and over-sized shades, Phil Davis was genuinely unsettling in the original. But with his puppy-eyes and sleepy demeanor, the Burberry-clad Mays just bears a striking and distinctly non-threatening resemblance to one Anthony Aloysius Hancock of 23 Railway Cuttings, East Cheam."I'm not making films for film critics," says Love. "I'm not trying to be an art-house filmmaker... I'm making films for the f****** chav generation." Which, although unbelievably patronising, is absolutely fair enough. Not everybody wants to be Antonioni, and thank God for that. "But as a filmmaker," he continues, "I need to start metamorphosis. I can't keep making f****** chav generation films." On this evidence, Love hasn't cracked the cocoon yet. The most positive thing you can say about Nick Love's The Firm is that it isn't Nick Love's Outlaw.
