After having sat through the hour and a half of "hard-hitting", "explosive", "chilling" malarkey what constitutes The Football Factory, I have to say I'm all the shocked in the world, is what. Obviously, this being a predominately print-based review, you'll have to take my word for it, but believe me when I say my mouth is literally open by about 2, 3 centimetres.

How in the hell a film so laughable, so ridiculous, so insulting, so patronising and so shamelessly derivative can be a product of the great nation what gave us the films of Guy Richie is beyond me.

How this waste of a couple of good actors and lots and lots of Third Yob From The Left's managed to convince folks that it was anything other than an utterly transparent bout of issue-addressing masquerading as lets-show-folks-getting-their-heads-stomped-on is, in fact, so far beyond me, that if I lean over and squint really really hard, I still can't see how this happened.

And I can squint, man, you better believe it.

What The Football Factory concerns itself with, is a group of gentlemen like the football, and so find it necessary to beat folks, kick folks, stamp on a head, throw a brick, say about you are a cunt and so on.

This is the British football, y'see, what you Americans folks like to call "soccer". The difference between American Football and Real Football is that American folks run about the field hitting, kicking, slamming one another, whereas the more civilised British variant prefers to do this outside of the field, maybe on the street outside, often with hammers or crowbars, or maybe a flair gun or something.

The film starts with a newsreader type talking to camera about the "hooligans" and "yobs", and also mentions "thugs" and stuff. He tries to give a bit of the old sociological hypothesis, but is interrupted when our hero, Tommy Johnson, jumps in and punches him upside the head. He says about what the fuck you banging on about, cunt?

Those fucking intellectuals, man. They need a good tight kick in the spine or two is what the film would like to announce.

Of course, not being the most intelligent 90 minutes you'll ever witness, the film then wants to try a bit of the old sociology itself, but its ok, cause the filmmakers use words like "cunt" and "fuck" and "thieving little bastard" instead of "egalitarianism."

The point it would like to make, via the utilisation of the aforementioned words, is that these folks are a product of their environment. It's all because they grew up in these "concrete jungles" and so on, and sniff glue. Those housing estates, man, they just spit out Nazi motherfuckers like you wouldn't believe.