In defence of the Rise of the Footsoldier… | Little White Lies

In Praise Of

In defence of the Rise of the Foot­sol­dier franchise

13 Nov 2019

Words by Paul Ridd

Two people, a man and a woman, are embracing passionately in a dimly lit, red-tinted scene.
Two people, a man and a woman, are embracing passionately in a dimly lit, red-tinted scene.
The low-rent British gang­ster series has a lot more to offer than brain­less, bru­tal violence.

A lin­eage of unex­pect­ed­ly pop­u­lar sup­port­ing char­ac­ters trans­formed, even res­ur­rect­ed, across works by their mak­ers to become leads of their own sto­ries can be traced from Sir John Fal­staff via Frasi­er Crane and now Pat Tate (Craig Fair­brass), star of the spirit­ed­ly nasty and weird­ly jol­ly Rise of the Foot­sol­dier films, the lat­est of which arrived on VOD last week.

What began in 2007 as a straight­for­ward­ly bru­tal Brit gang­ster film with Rise of the Foot­sol­dier, a grimy epic built around the var­i­ous hooli­gans, club pro­mot­ers and drug deal­ers involved in the real life Ret­ten­don Range Rover mur­ders, has by 2019’s entry, Rise of the Foot­sol­dier: Mar­bel­la, trans­formed into some­thing more akin to com­e­dy, and cer­tain­ly removed from any claims to his­tor­i­cal verisimilitude.

The new film is a vio­lent car­toon in which a sup­port­ing char­ac­ter and fan favourite from the first film, brutish gang­ster Pat Tate (Craig Fair­brass), is now firm­ly the lead of the saga: break­ing heads, cussing out jok­ers, dou­ble cross­ing low-lifes in the Span­ish sun­shine and the mean streets of Essex and gen­er­al­ly kick­ing off. All this plays out against the back­drop of an 80s and 90s set­ting most­ly defined by the strate­gic deploy­ment of a few catchy era-appro­pri­ate tunes over any extrav­a­gant or expen­sive peri­od detail beyond track­suits, cheesy shirts and bad hair­cuts worn by the cen­tral cast of hoodlums.

Rise of the Foot­sol­dier is, of course, just one of many cheap and cheer­ful films tak­ing the Ret­ten­don shoot­ings as inspi­ra­tion for var­i­ous Essex Boys-themed gang­ster frol­ics. The likes of Essex Boys, Bond­ed by Blood, Fall of the Essex Boys, Essex Boys: Ret­ri­bu­tion, Essex Boys: The Laws of Sur­vival and Bond­ed by Blood 2 all deliv­er vio­lent antics with vary­ing degrees of seri­ous­ness, often deploy­ing the same actors and crews. These British films also neat­ly tra­verse the years which sep­a­rate the the­atri­cal break out hits of the likes of Guy Ritchie, Matthew Vaughn and Nick Love in the ear­ly 2000s from the cur­rent mar­ket for cheer­ful­ly unpleas­ant, appar­ent­ly rather anony­mous straight-to-video UK mob flicks.

Even the eight years that sep­a­rat­ed the orig­i­nal Foot­sol­dier from its first sequel, 2015’s Rise of the Foot­sol­dier Part II, saw the fran­chise adjust bud­get and scale, sit­u­at­ing itself firm­ly in home video ter­ri­to­ry. This is in no small part due to a more gen­er­al indus­tri­al shift of the British gangster/​hooligan genre into that space due to vol­ume of out­put as much as audi­ence appetite for cheap and sleazy home enter­tain­ment. Inevitable par­o­dies, notably Nick Nevern’s The Hooli­gan Fac­to­ry from 2014, reflect a genre at absolute sat­u­ra­tion point. But it is not sim­ply the mar­ket that dic­tat­ed the change in form and style for the Foot­sol­dier sequels.

Two men standing near a car boot with an injured person inside.

While the sec­ond film con­tin­ues in grim­ly morose mode, expand­ing on the sto­ry of lead Carl­ton Leach (Ric­ci Har­nett, who also wrote and direct­ed the film) and deal­ing with the after­math of the shoot­ings, there is some hint of the direc­tion the fran­chise would lat­er go, par­tic­u­lar­ly in more leisure­ly paced dia­logue scenes that give full flavour to the series’ now char­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly fre­quent and inven­tive swear­ing. Slang and insults are hurled between low-rent gang­sters dur­ing brawls and tor­ture scenes with mer­ry aban­don, while the visu­al style is also less errat­ic and showy than in the first film, though an obses­sion with dis­play­ing the naked female form in lan­guorous mon­tages, as well as the kinet­ic and fran­ti­cal­ly edit­ed fights, remain intact.

How­ev­er, by the third Foot­sol­dier, a new nar­ra­tive and tone are firm­ly estab­lished, attrib­ut­able almost entire­ly to Fair­brass’ Pat. Dead by the end of the first film, Tate is res­ur­rect­ed to appear in nom­i­nal pre­quels’ which essen­tial­ly trans­form the series into a vehi­cle for the char­ac­ter and his clos­est crim­i­nal asso­ciates (played with gus­to by Ter­ry Stone and Roland Manookian) to riff off each oth­er with ener­get­i­cal­ly juicy dia­logue in between ses­sions of often nifti­ly chore­o­graphed vio­lence, sex and drug taking.

Rise of the Foot­sol­dier 3 and Mar­bel­la com­bine ele­ments of prison dra­ma, clas­si­cal rags-to-rich­es gang­ster movie, British crime caper and even 70s sex com­e­dy to deliv­er infec­tious­ly enter­tain­ing, gener­i­cal­ly slip­pery low-bud­get fun. Their slim bud­gets and loy­al fan­base allow for a play­ful­ness and stretch­ing of nar­ra­tive and gen­er­al log­ic, such that it would be lit­tle sur­prise should the same char­ac­ters vis­it the moon or fight zom­bies in a future outing.

The ele­ments hang togeth­er loose­ly by inven­tive­ly pro­fane dia­logue (“When a stone-cold fuck­ing coke­head refus­es a fat line of gear, you don’t need to be Miss Cunt­ing Fuck­ing Marple to realise there’s some­thing fuck­ing seri­ous­ly wrong!”) and, cru­cial­ly, the good humoured appeal of Fair­brass’ per­for­mance. A lum­ber­ing, intim­i­dat­ing fig­ure, Fair­brass exudes pow­er and men­ace on screen. But the tone of the lat­est films is so emphat­i­cal­ly hys­ter­i­cal, so insis­tent­ly extreme, as to nev­er be tak­en too seri­ous­ly; the bru­tal­i­ty nev­er real­ly felt beyond a puerile glee at the trans­gres­sive excess on screen. Fair­brass, mean­while, has edged fur­ther into sub­tle self-satire in a way that match­es the franchise’s new­ly invig­o­rat­ed par­o­d­ic energy.

Tate, a real-life Essex boy, appears in the orig­i­nal film as a far more overt­ly malev­o­lent fig­ure, capa­ble of sud­den, hor­rif­ic vio­lence as the ring­leader of the doomed crime ring exe­cut­ed at Ret­ten­don. The his­tor­i­cal accu­ra­cy of the film and Fair­brass’ depic­tion of Tate is the sub­ject of heat­ed debate. But it is safe to say that by the time of his reap­pear­ance in the third and fourth films he has mor­phed into some­thing entire­ly sep­a­rate and comedic – a sly send-up of the UK gang­ster hard man, played con­vinc­ing­ly straight enough for the char­ac­ter to remain men­ac­ing, yet some­how per­verse­ly endearing.

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