Rise of the Footsoldier

You have to worry about a gangster film featuring potty-mouthed Lahn-dahn geezers that apparently can't run to the services of Danny Dyer.

Never mind. Doing a passable imitation of the great man is Ricci Harnett, who plays Carlton Leech, a football yob whose default emotion appears to be dumb fury.

We first meet the delightful Carlton when he's running around, slicing people up, as a fully-paid up member of West Ham's notorious ICF - Inter City Firm.

Realising that the era of the terrace hooligan is in extra time, he takes his skills with fists, boots and a blade to the glamorous world of Essex nightclubs.

Running the doors with a rod of iron (or whatever comes to hand) he's soon branching out into drug dealing just as the rave generation are getting the party started.

However, life isn't without its downside - an addiction to performance drugs means he's constantly cramming baby food down his mush while rival gangs - including a particularly vicious Turkish mob - are always threatening his turf.

Then suddenly we appear to be in the middle of a Crimewatch reconstruction directed by Sam Peckinpah as writer/director Julian Gilbey embarks on a half-witted expose of the murder of three gangsters in Essex woodland in 1995.

Tony Tucker, Pat Tate and Craig Rolfe were blasted to death in a Range Rover up a deserted track after a massive drugs deal went wrong. Result, might have been the verdict of less sensitive souls.

Played here by a posse of regulars in The Bill, London's Burning and Casualty (yes, Craig Fairbrass is on board), Gilbey offers a range of conspiracy theories about how these lowlifes ended up in the Locarno in the sky.

Brutal, bloody and barking, this zips along like an abbatoir on overtime while placing Essex on the food chain somewhere below millipedes but slightly above amoeba.

Women are naffin' more'n slaags who need a good slap while an individual's worth is gauged by how ably he can wield a pizza cutter on a restaurant manager's face. Thanks for that Craig.

Illuminated by Harnett's rambling, incoherent and plain silly voiceover, this makes Essex Boys - the Sean Bean outing that dealt with the same subject - look like Goodfellas.

Tim Evans