People are voting emotionally.

Absolutely Fantastic

This is a tender, generous movie that likes its characters and presents them as real people, full of flaws and strengths.

Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.

The late Alan Clarke's original 1988 version of The Firm was an allegory on the Thatcher regime dealing with the rise of football violence in the suburbs. The story concerned the activities of the ICC (Inner City Crew), a gang of West Ham supporters who engaged in pitched battles with their rival clubs' hooligan contingent. I missed it the first time around and only caught up with it very recently on DVD and found it to be a dated, campy, theatrical affair that seemed more concerned with presenting a political parallel to the Iron Lady's tyranny than properly addressing that era's (equally troubling) violence on the terraces. At the very least though, it did have a point and a purpose, both of which must have run for the hills when the 'genius' that is Nick Love (the non-thinking man's Guy Ritchie) came a-knocking at this particular property's door for a Noughties 'reimagining'.With an impressive lack of insight/understanding for the source material, Mockney-boy Love launches his audience head first into an ineptly staged 1984 set tale, of a young wannabe soccer lout, Dom (Calum McNab), finding himself befriended and welcomed into the ICC's ranks by top dog, Bex (Paul Anderson), only to get on his bad side when he develops cold feet and tries to make a run for it.Love club-footedly hops from one ill devised scene to the next, assaulting the senses with his trademark tin-eared dialogue and vacuous pop-promo visuals, making it increasingly obvious that he has no more interest in the psychological make-up of working class hoodlums than he does in trying to hone credible performances from his largely wooden cast. In fact, the whole enterprise has amateur hour written all over it: too much of the story takes place in too few locations, instantly betraying it's meagre budget and giving the proceedings a fake, plastic sheen. A skilled and talented director would have pulled out all the stops to paper over the cracks and create the illusion of a more costly production, but Love's lack of flair and imagination insures he does neither. This woeful handling of resources ultimately undoes the fight scenes too. Anyone who was around during that period (like I was), will clearly remember that these gang battles took place inside the grounds, and not on the streets as they're depicted here. Were you aiming for a revisionist angle Mr Love?Worst of all though, is the dispiriting, vulgar display of designer sportswear on show. Instead of using this cosmetic tick as an incidental background detail to enhance the story's sense of time and place, it's pushed crassly to the front line for a crude catwalk assembly of primary coloured tracksuits and 'smart casual' togs, resulting in an overstuffed canvas of Logo-porn to lather up the army of Ad*das fetishists this shameless parade is no doubt squarely aimed at.And if none of that has 'whetted' your appetite, then all the above is accompanied by a putrid, pumping 80's disco-pap soundtrack to give your ears a kicking as well as your eyes. 'Enjoy'.

Like a lot of people, when I first heard the news that Nick Love was "updating" the original version of The Firm I anticipated the worst. My objection lay not so much in the fact it was a remake of a classic film, but more as to why we needed yet another film centering on football hooliganism.The argument that such material merely glamorizes the violence it depicts, (appealing as it does to a section of youth that also worship the fashion and lingo of the genre) is without question. The worst example of which (and still prominent in most bargain bins of HMV up and down the land) would be the truly execrable "Green Street". A film so inept in its plotting, acting and overall plausibility that you'd be forgiven for thinking the whole thing had been stitched together by a gang of football thugs themselves.Contrary to what director Lexi Alexander may think, this was a film that at every opportunity served to heighten the voyeuristic delight of its male, teenage demographic. Self conscious fight sequences shot through with booming dance interludes, whilst a preoccupation with all things bloody gave way to an orgiastic ending which was more like a scene from Braveheart than a realistic portrayal of football mob violence.Which brings us back to Love and The Firm. What immediately strikes here, as it does in "Goodnight Charlie Bright", and "The Football Factory" is the skill and accuracy with which Love conveys his subject matter.The film is also a far warmer and optimistic piece than anything Love has made so far. Central character "Dominic" shares an all too believable rapport with his father, forever wrangling money from him, whilst both parents playfully tease him throughout the film - trying their best not to cramp his style when a friend catches Dom at his local sports store.It is this held focus on the family, combined with the way in which Dominic is positioned when the violence first unfolds (felled by a single punch and then little more than a terrified witness for the remainder of the film)that make for a clear mission statement on the behalf of the director.The scenes of violence here must also be commended for their reserve and authenticity. Thanks to Love's impeccable eye for the 1980s, the sense of watching a documentary on football violence runs close at times, with the camera skittering about to capture snatches of fight that never quite take off as quite accurately, the police intervene - with their standard uniform and makeshift formation, capturing them in flux before the later arrival of CCTV and full riot gear.This lends real tension to these scenes. Yet Love has no agenda here other than to show how quickly such altercations are broken up and how they often amount to little more than benign screaming matches. Even the more "laddish" Football Factory tended not to dwell on the full scale chaos between its football gangs and Love has clearly kept this in mind with The Firm.It must be said however, that the film hardly breaks new territory. (within what is already a very limited genre) Though there is no question that the look and feel of the era has been captured brilliantly and that as top boy "Bex" Paul Anderson is suitably charged, with its rather obvious ending - an eye for an eye simply meaning someone will end up losing their head, it is at least a refreshing twist to see Love's championing of the values of friends and family over the raging poison of the hooligans themselves.

Nick Love's films are not about football violence, they are about men. They ask the question, how do boys become men in a world where the men around them are dysfunctional, often abused and abusive, or in the case of our public figures, corrupt? His films often use the back drop of the football tribe (gang), where it is understood, you can at once lose yourself and find an instant identity, but at what cost? The men in Nick Loves films are always flawed & struggling to find their place in a world that regards their attitude and energies as irrelevant, and as a result they are drawn, by the perceived excitement and glamour, into the bosom of the street gang. At the core of many of our social ills are dysfunctional men, failing themselves & us on a daily basis. This self hatred, often intensified by drink or drugs, is channelled back at society in many forms, often violent. Nick Love's films open up this world of male adversarial culture and expose it to the sun light. With an uncompromising swagger and flare, he addresses often distasteful issues that are very present, to a greater or lesser degree, all around us and many young men have to face on a daily basis. In fact one of the reasons Nick Loves films manage to gain finance, is that he is always aware of his audience and as a result has built a loyal following that feel understood by a British film maker. It is lazy not to understand the themes Nick Love is trying to explore, and too easy to join the band wagon of criticism, which in many ways mimics the criticism boys & men face through out their life, as their energies are misunderstood. Far better to welcome the maturing of a talent, and to support and celebrate a British film maker, who is still managing to use the canvas of film to explore themes that are universal, and as relevant today as they were in the 1980s. Nick Love however, is not Alan Clarke and his subjects, although similar, are very different. Alan Clarke's main thesis was political and his original film was written in a time that saw the working class being remodelled along Thatcherite principles. Clarke & Hunter perceived the football 'thugs' as an extension of the selfish yuppie, that became detached from the traditional community and was looking for a home and found football. While it cannot be denied that the political pressures and unrest of the Thatcher period were profound, and gave rise to a number of dispossessed subcultures, Nick Love's film operates in a world of the personal, not political. His film feels written from the inside out, not the other way round. Gone are the endless scenes debating the rights and wrongs of football violence, which felt heavy with the hand of the filmmaker, and in comes a confident understanding of the world of the story. Free from this pressure to explain the terms of the genre, Love's film becomes about belonging, about the excitement and rituals of the tribe. Whether thematically this is better or worse is one of personal preference, suffice to say, it would have been deeply misguided for Love to have attempted to voice Clarkes themes, which although potent, feel redundant from this point in history. One could argue that Clarke & Hunters original film failed to fully understand the subculture they used as their political vehicle. In one of the final scenes of the original 'Firm', a minor characters says to a documentary crew,''..its not about the football, we would organize around darts if we could'' .. this has been shown through study to be incorrect. No other sport has thrown up such a subculture as 'Football Hooligans'. It is tribal and deeply rooted, as in the case of Milwall & West Ham, in years and years of territorial and geographical rivalry. Football violence existed long before Clarke or Love, what happened in the 1980s, is it became highly organized, and as Love correctly identifies in his film, it became 'fashionable'. Nick Love's 'The Firm' understands this and in many ways is a truer representation of this phenomenon. There are a handful of British film makers working today, that are able to explore issues which go to the heart of our culture, within a global multiplex environment . Like it or loath it, Nick Love reaches out and provides a voice to a disaffected , often working class audience, and does this against enormous odds, not least, the middle class critical establishment.

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.