Marching Powder (2025)

movie review, gangsters, Marching Powder

Discovered Marching Powder via some Rockstar promotion: Dany Dyer, Marching Powder’s protagonist Jack, was Kent Paul’s voice in two Grand Theft Auto Games. Promotional video, trailer, looked pretty impressive in that gritty low-scale criminal way, namely a football hooligan on drugs in this case. Whether it held up to that first impression, though, is hard to say.

So. Jack and his buddies are football hooligans. You know the type: loud, takes matches with their team way too seriously, and will get violent at the mere sniff of rivalry. After one such severe clash yet probably categorized under “Tuesday” in their book, Jack gets arrested for cocaine possession. Under court orders, he’s now to attend six weeks of couples’ counseling therapy, and stay nice and clean. Easier said than done, as it turns out. Jack only kind of chose this hooligan life, because it was fun, and all his friends were doing it. The rest of it? The rest of it was this hooligan life choosing him. And, boy, will he have to fight it off now, tooth and nail, as temptation, opportunity, peer pressure, and other factors begin battering him from all sides now that he can’t have it. Who knew it was so hard to stay out of trouble, when you sort of, kind of, built your entire past-time around trouble?

Movie starts with an introduction, summarizing what you’re about to get: we watch Jack describe his marriage as “cunt married to a cock”, neglected wife show resentment as anger just be heard, their child being exposed to all this toxic shit, and why it’s all like that. The why is Jack’s choice of fun. He goes out to hang with his buddies, gets high on what they call Marching Powder, and then they all find trouble, picking fights with both random people, and rival football team fans. When that sentence is extended to him, you, as a viewer who is familiar with many such stories, already know it’ll not be as easy as it would be to those whose environments are to any degree healthier. But the entire fun of these tales, after all, is to watch and see them stumble, then get back up again, right?

We watch Jack’s running crew, these grown men, pressure one another into bad things. But we also get to see the twisted loyalty, and the truth about Jack: he’s not actually a bad guy. He will step out of his way to help people in trouble, even at the risk of his own safety. And, we get to see him grow, develop. From an absolute cock to just, maybe, a dickhead. One that slowly but surely is finding balance.

Marching Powder, overall, is not very good, no. The jokes are very mediocre, there’s some funny in a bad way, editing choices, and the story isn’t anything groundbreaking. But it’s a solid movie to sit down and watch with a drink and some snacks, someone to comment at it with you, grumble, and laugh. British-English is something else. And who thought it clever to call coke – “dickie”?