This film covers the events which led up to a
particularly blood-soaked triple gangland slaying in the UK in December, 1995.
The subsequent investigation resulted in the arrest and conviction of two
mobsters and the disappearance of another into the witness protection
program. This same territory had already been covered by another British
film, The Essex Boys, which came out in 2000, but Rise of the Footsoldier
is grittier and more authentic than that earlier film for two crucial
reasons:
1) Essex Boys was a roman a clef which gave it the freedom to embellish
the story with fictional details. Rise of the Footsoldier uses the
characters' real names and is based on the autobiographical account of
Carlton Leach, a close associate of the three slain men.
2) The director of Footsoldier tries to recreate the authentic
atmosphere of the times and the mindset of the main characters. It take
more of a documentary-style approach than Essex Boys, and portrays a
substantial amount of angry violence in graphic detail.
Footsoldier tells its version of the story within a broad long-term
framework, establishing the background facts by following Carlton Leach's
rise in the gangland hierarchy. Leach begins as a violent football hooligan
with a particularly well developed body and an especially tough demeanor.
He starts to earn some money as a club doorman, and his success as hired
muscle leads to
other opportunities in the "security" business, most of which involve
protecting guys who have to deal with unsavory characters in risky
and illegal situations. The security duties place Leach squarely in the middle of gangland, and it's
only a matter of time before he has his own "firm" and is engineering his
own deals.
The film paints a loathsome picture of that life. The central
characters are uneducated and violent men to begin with, and their
violence gets out of control when they start to build up muscle with
anabolic steroids, which fuels "roid rages." Their violence, in turn,
provokes others to violence against them. The people they deal with and
the people they oppose, ranging from the "Turkish Mafia" to fellow British
yobs, are as crazed and cruel as they. The brutality in their lives is not
confined to others in their criminal life, but often spills over into
those "straightheads" with whom they have contact, and sometimes even into
innocent bystanders. One of the Essex boys has a particularly uneasy
relationship with those in the service industry, and occasionally beats a
waiter or delivery boy to the edge of death for some real or imagined
failure to perform his duties properly.
When those three men were murdered, the police worked on establishing
motive by creating a list of those who wanted them dead. It boiled down to
"pretty much everyone who had ever met them except Carlton Leach."
The critics dealt harshly with this film. Both The Guardian and BBC
assigned their lowest possible score, but I don't consider that fair, at least as I
understand the purpose of a film review. In my view, a low score should
say, "I found this to be a poor movie," but they used those scores to
say, "I found this an unpleasant experience." That's very different. The
Guardian and BBC reviewers were both repulsed by the graphic violence and
constantly ugly tone of the film. When the main characters are not beating
someone senseless, they seem about ready to do so, and the audience is
soon channeled into a mind-set which is prepared for mayhem to erupt at
any moment, even when the characters seem in tranquil situations. When an
Essex Boy is on screen, any minor slight can provoke volcanic anger. Does
that make it an absolutely unpleasant film to watch? Yes. But that does
NOT make it a bad film. In fact, the reactions of those critics provide
some evidence that the film is very effective at doing what it sets out to
do, which is to demonstrate what it was like to be a fly on the wall when
the Essex Boys conducted their business. It limns brutal thugs who took
a lot of drugs, lived above the law, had sex with lots of hookers, and
administered a lot of ugly beatings to one another and others, with and
without justification. With hard-driving music, fast-paced editing,
authentic acting and realistic gore, the film re-creates the lives of
those brutes in a manner which is not normally seen in British films, and
which was probably too accurate and explicit for some of the more sensitive critics.
Don't get me wrong. I didn't enjoy the film any more than the BBC
reviewer did. An ugly and mean-spirited film like this is just not the
sort of thing I would watch for my own enjoyment, and the film did
occasionally cross the line between portraying violence and indulging in
it. For example, the film shows the famous shotgun murders three times.
One of those
recreates the gory events as they were portrayed in the trial and
conviction of the accused murderers, but since the convicted men have to this
day denied any involvement, and since everyone in Essex hated the victims,
there was no shortage of alternate possibilities. The film shows two of
those other alternatives in equally grisly detail. That represents a lot
of shotgun-splattered skulls in a short time, but I would defend this
portrayal as completely consistent with the film's narrative. Since the
film is based on Leach's first-person account and is voiced over by his
first person narrative, and since the slaying was the only key event of
which he had no first-hand experience, the only proper way to render this
event within his POV was to show those alternatives which he considered
possible.
Yes, the film is ugly, and the working class accents are very difficult
to understand, but I did watch it all the way through without any thought
of the fast-forward button, and when it was over I felt that I had
experienced the events and emotions of lives which I could not have
imagined without the movie's help. Of course, I also felt that I needed a
shower and some fresh air, but I'm quite sure that's exactly what the
director intended.
