'The Firm', a remake of Alan Clarke's 1989 hooliganism study

The Firm

(Nick Love): Calum McNab, Paul Anderson, Daniel Mays.

Running time: 90 minutes. Rating: 1/5.

The first thing you notice about The Firm, a remake of Alan Clarke's 1989 study of football hooliganism (which detours through Shane Meadows' This is England), is the director has a shoe fetish. You think this is going to relent after the first five minutes, but oh no: put dopey youngster Dom (Colum McNab) or barking mad Bex (Paul Anderson), anywhere near a pair of 1980s Adidas shoes, and the camera starts humping their leg. It crawls up their shiny, slim-fit tracksuits like a sex offender on day release from Siberia. These alphamale mongoloids are so primped and preened and angry at other men, you start to wonder if it is a story of latent homosexuality.

On the surface, at least, it's a coming-of-age snoozefest shoehorned into the goings-on of West Ham's infamous Inter-City Firm. It tries too hard but doesn't try hard enough: it hustles you with an anthemic 1980s soundtrack; sashays with fetish fashion; and tries so much to impress with credible slang, the characters themselves get so confused they begin asking each other what they mean. This would all be tolerable if this listless film had snap and swing. But the editor seems to have had his head trampled in the melee.