Marching Powder (dir. Nick Love)

by Jack Martin | Mar 8, 2025

Certificate: 18

Running Time: 96 mins

UK Distributor: True Brit Entertainment

UK Release Date: 7 March 2025

WHO’S IN MARCHING POWDER?

Danny Dyer, Calum MacNab, Stephanie Leonidas, Arty Dyer, Bailey Patrick, Lex Shrapnel, Daniel Fearn, Janet Kumah, Geoff Bell, Phillip Ray Tommy, Stanley J. Browne, Dean Harrison, Leon Dean

WHO’S BEHIND THE CAMERA?

Nick Love (director, writer), Chris Clark and Will Clarke (producers), Alfie Godfrey (composer), Simon Stolland (cinematographer), Pani Scott (editor)

WHAT’S IT ABOUT?

A football hooligan (Dyer) must turn his life around…

WHAT ARE MY THOUGHTS ON MARCHING POWDER?

Love him or hate him, Danny Dyer is one of those Brits that you know as soon as you hear their name. Thanks to lead roles in films like The Football Factory, The Business and Outlaw – not to mention a recurring gig on EastEnders – Dyer has become synonymous with “hard man” roles that go hand in hand with his thick Cockney accent and chiselled ruffian looks, and God bless him for making a whole career out of just being himself (to where he named his Love Island-winning daughter Dani Dyer, because of course he bloody well did).

Oddly, though, Marching Powder is his first film in over a decade. Perhaps his EastEnders stint ate up much of his time, as did the numerous reality shows he’s been participating in, but Dyer has largely been absent from the big screen, presumably using that time to hone his craft and finally deliver something more refined – mature, even – than his usual fare. As it turns out, that was wishful thinking, for Marching Powder – which sees Dyer reunite with filmmaker Nick Love, who directed him in all the films mentioned in the last paragraph – is more of the same pandering nonsense that only appeals to the toxic male crowd that Dyer has unwittingly become the poster boy for, one that may be overly nostalgic for an era that appears to become less and less relevant by the year.

In writer-director Love’s film, Dyer plays Jack Jones, a 40-something man in South London who balances his role as a husband to his put-upon wife Dani (Stephanie Leonidas) and father to their impressionable son JJ (Arty Dyer), and his cocaine-fuelled lifestyle as a football hooligan with his gang of similarly aging thugs. After being arrested following a scuffle with rival football fans in Grimsby, Jack is placed on probation and encouraged to put his destructive ways behind him and become a model citizen over the following six weeks, if he’s to avoid any prison time. His future on the line, Jack tries to cut himself off from the booze and drugs and what-have-you, but that becomes increasingly difficult when his disapproving father-in-law (Geoff Bell) instructs him to look after his mentally unstable brother-in-law Kenny Boy (Calum MacNab), whose own penchant for violence and mischief is arguably more dangerous than Jack’s ever was. Worse still, his old habits indeed die hard, which threaten to push Dani further and further away from him.

Having grown up in an era dominated by 2000s lad culture – from softcore magazines like Zoo Weekly and FHM, to the exploitative drivel that played non-stop on MTV and ITV2 – I recognise all too well the mannerisms that Marching Powder is trying to resurrect. The crass sex jokes, the glorification of gang violence and drug use, the profane vocabulary (including enough utterings of the C-word to send Mary Whitehouse to an even deeper grave); it’s all here, like it never left us since the days when Dyer and Love were at their peak. Even as a more impressionable teenager, I always found that type of culture quite obnoxious, and found myself wincing at it once more here as the film adopts that same laddish mentality, with Love’s script doubling down on its anti-woke mindset as fights are celebrated and even encouraged, characters boast about doing in their missus’s “back doors”, and all millennials are casually racist hipsters. Think of it as an Irvine Welsh novel if the Trainspotting and Filth author wasn’t actively warning his audience about the dangers of his characters’ lifestyles.

The key difference here, though, is that Dyer and his peers are no longer the youthful scamps they’re best remembered as, which makes scenes of men in their 40s doing and saying things that they would have been doing two or three decades earlier come off as rather pathetic. To the film’s credit, it does address the fact that Dyer’s protagonist is well past the point where he should be indulging in his habits like a hard-partying teen and should instead be taking on more adult responsibilities and making an actual path for himself. The same could be said for Dyer himself, who himself has taken steps in recent years to reinvent himself as a more accessible figure, which on the one hand shows some growth on his part as a public persona yet on the other makes his decision to return to this kind of role all the more flabbergasting. Even so, watching Dyer try to recapture that youthful energy when he’s clearly moved on from this type of role is the filmic equivalent of that “How Do You Do, Fellow Kids?” meme, except it’s much sadder and more pitiful than even he could have realised.

For better or worse, Marching Powder will undoubtedly find its audience, as have the many other Danny Dyer movies before it, though it leads one to question if anyone outside of that minority is genuinely nostalgic for this kind of film anymore, given how many of the things it promotes have been all but stamped out of our consciousness by a more inclusive and considerate pop culture. It seems neither Dyer nor Love got the memo that the world around them has grown up and moved on to other better things, so they’re stuck in time with a movie that itself feels like a relic of a more cringeworthy era in British culture, unwilling to adapt or even consider altering its outdated worldview for the modern age.

Maybe Danny Dyer should just stick to popping up on Celebrity Gogglebox every now and then.

SO, TO SUM UP…

Marching Powder brings audiences back to a best-forgotten era of obnoxious lad culture where Danny Dyer’s drug-infused hooliganism is celebrated more than it is warned against, though the clearly aged lead still acting his youthful self is much sadder than it ought to be, leaving the film an anti-woke relic in a more modern era.