Marching Powder review: Three bumps for Danny Dyer

Sniff, sniff, hurray! Marching Powder is everything you would expect it to be, but that is why you will love it.

You’ve seen this film before. You’ve seen these characters before. There is nothing new here. But that’s not why I decided to go to the cinema. Similar to a Jason Statham movie, you know what you're getting when going in, but that’s why you turn up.

Marching Powder, directed by Nick Love and starring Danny Dyer and Stephanie Leonidas, is everything you would expect it to be. Drugs, alcohol, football violence and Dyer’s cockney charm. Nothing more, nothing less.

After being caught fighting in the streets of Grimsby, Jack (Danny Dyer) has six weeks to prove to not only his probation officer, to his wife Dani (Stephanie Leonidas) that he is a changed man.

Which of course, he is not. Not even in the slightest.

In his efforts to prove that he isnt the low life he so clearly is, he makes his life spiral more and more out of control as he grapples with resisting his cocaine fuled urgers. Or dickie as it is apparently called in Cockney slang, which there is a lot of.

It’s the kind of film you watch with your dad as he puts your arm around you and reminisces over the glory days. He tells you stories about how good football used to be and how he used to be on the front lines defending the honour of men who didn’t know he existed.

This all acts as a staunch reminder that Marching Powder, is completely outdated. It feels like it was ripped straight out of the early 2000s and pushed into an era where the ideas it touches on no longer exist.

An unofficial sequel to Dyer’s The Football Factory if you like, just 20 years too late.

Of course, lads are still out in their Stone Island jackets fighting before football games thinking they are Mike Tyson and having competitions on who can snort the most cocaine in a cold, grim toilet on the wee-soaked stadium floors. Except it is hardly the rampant issue it was 20 years ago.

We’ve moved on from that. However, what we haven’t moved on from yet, is Danny Dyer. Dyer's portrayal as professional screw up Jack is what makes a terrible movie, watchable. Not just watchable, but something you will laugh at for the majority of its 96-minute runtime and have fun with.

His witty one-liners and failed attempts at being a good husband to Leonidas’s Dani shouldn’t be as funny as they are, yet his delivery and commitment to these nonsensical bits will have you unironically laughing in your chair.

Leonidas is equally as charming as Dani. Her disgust and bewilderment to Jack is comical and her chemistry with Dyer is surprisingly great. Admittedly, it is absolutely ludicrous that they are together in the first place but she carries that same sentiment with her character. Just like the audience, she doesn't know why shes enamoured with him, but she can't help it.

Their relationship is a reminder that when you look past the heaps of cocaine and alcohol, you are in fact watching a rom-com. A bad one, mind you, but a romcom nevertheless. I feel sorry for all the girlfriends who were tricked into watching this movie based on it being labelled as such.

That's not to say it is without romantic confessions of love. Towards the end of the film Jack tells Dani that he loves her more than Luton. When Harry Met Sally eat your heart out. That is what every wife wants to hear. The most romantic expression of love put to screen.

If you look at this film too deeply, you will realise it makes no sense. He should have faced consequences, if it wasn’t for the most lenient probation officer to hit the screen. Dani should have left him if not years before but certainly by the halfway point of this film when he gets off his face on drugs while babysitting his son.

There is no progression, we end the film right where we start it, but who cares?

If you go into this film, which I remind you is called Marching Powder, expecting a cohesive story and layered characters then that is on you. You were never going to get that. The title being a nickname for cocaine should be enough of an indicator of that.

However, if you are able to turn your brain off for just over an hour and a half and let yourself be grabbed by Dyer’s intoxicating charm then you will have a great time. It’s stupid, unrealistic and a complete mess, but that is what makes it good. You will laugh, even when you know you shouldn’t be, and that makes it worth your time.

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐