juneebuggy I've seen this same movie before in 'Cass' and 'Green Street Hooligans' -both of which I preferred. I'm Canadian and I still don't get the whole "hooliganism" thing. Why were these guys killing each other over footie teams? Anyways, this version follows 'Dom' a young football casual who gets drawn into the dangerous world of "The Firm" because of his fast mouth and sense of humour, then as the violence reaches a peak he finds he can't get out.This was still pretty good. I loved the authentic language filled with rhyming slang and pikey-isms and Dom's parents were sweet and just hilarious. A great (nostalgic) soundtrack too if you grew up in the eighties. Those outfits/sweatsuits the guys wore just killed me, and they thought they looked so cool. Dom's parents were right, he looked liked a postal box. 03.13

bluefoxniner An extremely accurate and authentic portrayal of what life is in the UK. The biggest question that films like this, green street etc leave me asking is..why on earth is the UK NOT considered a 3rd world country? It has no system of law and order, a justice system that has no concept of punishment and a police force who peruse speeding motorists with pure aggression and casually ignore rape and robbery. A society whose dependency on alcohol and violence has some balls calling countries with a marginally lower GDP ' 3rd world' . It is without question, the most violent, backward and dangerous country on the face of the planet with a 'legal' infrastructure.

ESXTony After seeing some magazine articles about the film I was full of hope that this may be the best football hoolie film yet and certainly give a 'truer' representation of what life was like following football in the early eighties. Unfortunately, the reality is that it really carries no direction, you don't really find out anything about any of the characters and the lack of violence doesn't do the film any favours. Gary Oldman was a real 'psycho' in the original, Paul Anderson does a reasonable job but just wasn't menacing enough. The fight scenes were very poor, showing stand offs rather than actual fighting, that just wasn't what happened when two firms arranged a meet in the 80's. The music bought back a few memories and the best part of the film was the clothing, at least they got that right to a certain extent with Sergio, Fila, Ellesse and Pringle getting a good showing. Overall, it's a watchable film but it's not a great football film, not a lot of action and it isn't the best hooligan film to date, the original still takes that accolade. It's a shame but I don't think the original 'Firm' is likely to be beaten.

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.