★★

It’s no mean feat to earn an 18 certificate in 2025. Sadism and hard sex will usually do it but audiences today are far too well immunised for drugs and swearing to cut the mustard. As for the 18s of yesteryear, they’ve all been downgraded to Us and PGs. You can catch them on the kids zone on Netflix. With this in mind, there’s something oddly endearing in Nick Love’s efforts to push the boat out for the solidly 18-rated Marching Powder. Somewhere amidst Love’s liberal approach to cocaine snorting, c-words and underage porn watching, all the wrong buttons have been pressed at the BBFC. It’s casually, half-arsedly shocking. A little like finding a condom in your dad’s wash bag when all you were looking for was dental floss. It’ll take more minty nylon to expunge that memory.

On the matter of promiscuous parentals, Marching Powder is pleasingly non-judgmental. Danny Dyer leads as ‘middle-aged f**k up’ Jack, a lad’s lad, layabout dad, with passions for cocaine abuse, larger and League Two football hooliganism. It’s the sort of role Dyer embraced with abandon in his pre-Eastenders days but with an added layer of vulnerability exposed. Love makes no bones about exposing Jack’s fallibilities – from his excess weight to erectile dysfunction – and there’s strange admirability in Dyer’s full-frontal engagement with so puerile a depiction of devolutionary masculinity. 

Certainly, there’s little redemption to be found in Jack’s depressingly circular progression from thug violence to thug violence, by way of the bottom of a pint glass and snifter. There’s only so many times a man can let down his family before the frustration kicks in. Admirable that Love’s commitment to anti-arc plotting, the approach does rather blunt his film’s scope for enjoyment. The general conceit here is that an arrested Jack, teetering on the brink of conviction, has just six weeks to turn his life around. It’s ninety minutes of haplessness and failure with six of redemption tagged on to the end.

And yet, Jack is fortunate in one regard. Oafish physical deterioration and failed ambition aside, his partner Dani (Stephanie Leonidas) really does seem to love him still. It’s a kind of tiresome, worn in romance – the film’s poster advertises Marching Powder as ‘a romcom with a kick’ – that only really exists within its own messy ecosystem. They share a kid, which goes someway to explain the longevity, but the imbalance of parental responsibility is transparent. One evening under Jack’s care all but hospitalises young JJ, who is played by Dyer’s own son Arty, ostensibly under the auspices that ‘no other kid would do it’. Said babysitting sequence, incidentally, was improvised. It’s entertainingly horrific.

Splashes of similar colour pepper the film well enough but can’t overcome the broader shortcomings. Even those partial to Dyer’s schtick will surely struggle with the film’s wildly uneven tone and bizarre aimlessness. Love ambles between the surreal and socially conscious, never quite able to stick with either or find consanguinity between the two.

Still, there are one or two decent laughs to be found amid the effs and jeffs, not to mention a gleefully uncouth opening animation, as primed to catch you off guard as set guttural expectations. Dyer proves oddly endearing company, even as Jack’s trajectory tests patience. Love’s final bow leaves nauseous optimism and a slightly sour taste.

T.S.