For film investors, there's no such thing as a sure thing, but a low-budget picture about football hooligans directed by Nick Love comes close. That's why the cockney auteur has been able to knock out The Firm while waiting for financing for his big-screen remake of The Sweeney.
For his take on Alan Clarke's celebrated 1988 original, Love has resisted the temptation to update the action to the present. After all, football violence ain't what it used to be. And as we follow the fortunes of Bex and co's West Ham Crew as they compete with Millwall and Portsmouth to be the top dogs of England, we're nourished by amiable nostalgia for fashion-forward primary-coloured tracksuits and such mid-1980s soul classics as Rene & Angela's "I'll Be Good". Whatever you think of the films of former model/football hooligan Love, you have to hand it to him: he knows his clothes and his music.
An even greater specificity informs the big-screen adaptation of Kevin Sampson's Wirral-set novel Awaydays, which concerned aspiring Tranmere Rovers hooligan/arty post-punk music fan Carty and his closeted gay pal Elvis, ricocheting between the ruck and Echo & the Bunnymen gigs in 1979-80. We don't doubt this is all rooted in authentic experiences.
Awaydays uses the familiar device of the outsider breaking in, providing an easy focal point for audience empathy. The risible Green Street (2005) tried the same trick with the implausible tale of a Harvard student visiting his sister in London, earning his stripes with West Ham's Green Street elite. Casting didn't help any, since the young American was played by boyish, 5ft 6in former Hobbit Elijah Wood, and his mentor by Geordie Queer as Folk star Charlie Hunnam. Presumably the woefulness of the latter's London accent was not evident to the film's German director, Lexi Alexander.
A quest for identity powers football-violence movies as various as Cass (tagline: "The hardest fight is finding out who you are") and ID ("When you go undercover remember one thing... Who you are"). The former is the true story of Jamaican-born Cass Pennant, who grew up the target of racist bullies until he found respect and a sense of belonging with West Ham's Inter City Firm (them again). The latter is the more fanciful tale of an undercover cop (Reece Dinsdale) who finds new meaning in his life when he's assigned to infiltrate the violent fans of fictional London team Shadwell.
Despite the earnest trappings, this genre recognises that the audience is most likely to be young men who are, have been or aspired to be hooligans. Ladle on the moralising, but don't stint on the punching, kicking and scary weaponry. Humour helps, too, which is why Nick Love's 2004 effort The Football Factory (tagline: "What else you gonna do on a Saturday?") is the genre's most straightforwardly enjoyable entry. Danny Dyer may spend the movie haunted by a portent of his own violent demise, but that doesn't stop him amusingly relishing his chosen lifestyle, while modelling a covetable wardrobe of terrace chic.
The Firm represents a maturing step up from Love's recent geezer-porn efforts, or, more accurately, a return to the bittersweet tone of his critically praised but little-seen feature debut, Goodbye Charlie Bright. Love savvily shifts The Firm's protagonist from psycho hard man Bex (memorably played by Gary Oldman in the original) to young recruit Dom (Calum McNab, excellent).
The few fight scenes have an authentic-seeming, messy, tentative aspect, bigger on bravado than bloodshed. Reviews are likely to be sympathetic; audiences might have preferred an endearingly jocular Danny Dyer bleeding all over his Burberry.
Best scene: Dom is humiliated for daring to wear the exact same bright-red Ellesse tracksuit as top boy Bex.
The Firm opens on 18 September
The five best football hooligan flicks
The Firm
(18) Alan Clarke, 1988
Starring Gary Oldman, Lesley Manville
Originally made for TV by acclaimed director Alan Clarke, this remains the primary film text about 1980s English soccer hooliganism. Hugely controversial for what was viewed as a celebration of thuggery, what stands out now are gauche attempts at moral distance: a TV news report and a faux documentary coda explore what makes the football hooligan tick.
Best scene: Bex visits his childhood bedroom, walls covered in football heroes of his youth, and digs out a suitcase of weaponry.
ID
(18) Philip Davis, 1995
Starring Reece Dinsdale, Sean Pertwee
If you can get past the premise of an undercover cop ditching his job and marriage for the hooligan lifestyle he's meant to be exposing, there's plenty to enjoy here. The depiction of Shadwell fans in identical scarves and bobble hats didn't earn authenticity points, neither did the "punk" styling of one of the firm in studded wristbands and backward baseball cap.
Best scene: The lads, having run into a chemist to hide from their foes, arm themselves with anti-perspirant and hair spray.
The Football Factory
(18) Nick Love, 2004
Starring Danny Dyer, Frank Harper
Following steady film work as a drug dealer, borstal boy, prisoner, soldier and thief, Dyer was a slam-dunk to play the protagonist and narrator of Love's first big-screen stab at the genre. Based on John King's novel, the film presented the activities of its protagonists as an exciting, if potentially lethal, escape from soulless modern life.
Best scene: Two young scamps, who have mistakenly robbed the home of feared elder Frank Harper, get kicked off the coach deep in hostile Liverpool territory.
Cass
(18) Jon S Baird, 2008
Starring Nonso Anozie, Natalie Press
Based on Cass Pennant's own memoir, Congratulations, You Have Just Met the ICF, this tells of an orphaned Jamaican boy growing up in a racist area of London. He wins a sense of identity through fighting alongside West Ham's Inter City Firm, but is jailed for GBH. Redemption arrives when he holds back from retribution against the racist thug who tried to kill him.
Best scene: Cass and pals bitch about greater press coverage for a rival firm.
Awaydays
(18) Pat Holden, 2009
Starring Nicky Bell, Liam Boyle
Adapted by Kevin Sampson from his cult novel about growing up a fan of Tranmere Rovers - across the Mersey from the two Liverpool powerhouses - in the post-punk era, this is one of the rare examples of a hooligan movie that is not set in London. Sampson is proud of Merseyside's position at the vanguard of casual fashion in 1979-80, although you probably had to be there to appreciate the wedge haircuts, if not the impressive period music of the time, featured on the soundtrack. Additionally, it contains one of the most obtuse gay coming-out scenes in film history - presumably in the hope that the less progressive segments of the audience will miss it altogether.
Best scene: Our young hero, sick of being ignored by the aloof sales assistant at Liverpool's trendy Probe record store, gets his attention with the direct action of a head butt.