Danny Dyer’s bold new film has raised eyebrows among one of his biggest fanbases with reported walkouts over its graphic nature.
Marching Powder sees Dyer star as Jack Jones, an ageing, drug-taking football hooligan who’s arrested after violent matchday exploits and given six weeks to turn his life around – or else face prison.
Sold as an ‘outrageous comedy about addiction, violence and happy endings’, with romance and violence (‘but this ain’t no rom-com’, it insists), the movie nonetheless appears to have taken some by surprise.
After the film released in cinema on Friday, people have been heading out to see it.
As fan Liam shared on X: ‘Went to watch that new Danny Dyer film Marching Powder. The funniest thing that happened was an elderly couple who clearly didn’t know what they were getting themselves into got up to leave after 20 minutes and the woman said to her husband “Well he’s not like that on EastEnders”.’
Whether or not this particular walkout actually took place, it is true that Dyer’s character of Jack is worlds away from that of Mick Carter, the kind and patriotic family man and landlord of the Queen Vic pub he played on EastEnders.
So people who’ve only become aware of him since he was beamed into their televisions several nights a week during prime time will be quite surprised to see him sniffing copious amounts of coke, let his young son watch porn and drop a constant stream of C-bombs, right from the off.
Dyer, 47, played Mick on EastEnders from 2013 until 2022, garnering awards and fans alike for his popular turn – but he was actually attracted to the soap role because it was different to how he had been cast before.
Marching Powder is a reunion for the star with The Football Factory director Nick Love, and that 2004 film – in which he played a violent Chelsea fan – is what set Dyer on a path of regularly playing hard men.
In his latest film, Dyer’s character Jack is trying to fix his relationship with his long-suffering wife Dani (Stephanie Leonidas), while also be a better, more available parent to his son JJ (played by Dyer’s real-life 11-year-old son Arty).
But Marching Powder is not shy about leaning into profanities and its distinctly NSFW nature, even getting in within seconds of the film’s start in its narration: ‘In the simple old days when a c**k belonged to a man and a c**t to a woman.’
There’s also a title card reused that refers to a more upmarket neighbourhood as ‘somewhere over in c**tsville’ and Jack has a yen for, as he puts it, taking his wife and ‘smashing her backdoors in’.
Dyer as Jack is also seen naked and masturbating in the kitchen and describes something at one point as ‘appealing as sitting in Gary Glitter’s lap’.
According to The Sun, which claims to have counted all of the swearing in the film, it has ‘229 rude words, including 159 F-bombs and 45 C-words’, which sounds pretty accurate.
I could go on – but yes, Dyer’s EastEnders fan base, or those who enjoyed him as sweet tech whizz Freddie Jones on Disney Plus’s Jilly Cooper TV adaptation Rivals – will likely will be shocked, it’s safe to say.
Reactions so far to the film have been mixed, while critics didn’t hold back.
While the Daily Mail’s critic announced ‘I loathed pretty much every moment of this movie and its mannered, sub-Guy Ritchie style’ in a one-star review, Little White Lies complained: ‘Not even Dyer’s boyish charm and undeniable screen presence – when he does manage to recapture the raw intensity that made him a star in the first place – can redeem Love’s rancid script.’
Fans who’ve already been to the cinema to see it have also been sharing their thoughts.
‘Exactly what you expect from a Danny Dyer film,’ viewer Craig Ewen shared on X. ‘Entertaining and some good laughs but never delivers on the promise it has. Standard football hooligan film which at least laughs at itself. Probably should have straight to streaming. 3.5’
‘It’s not a sequel but ‘romcom’ Marching Powder is to Football Factory what T2 Trainspotting was to its original,’ tweeted Garry Arnot. ‘Danny Dyer is on form as a coked-up football hooligan left behind by modern society, but Nick Love’s regressive writing has also been left behind by modern society.’
Others were more positive, with fan Ben Wesley – who undertook a Dyer marathon – calling The Football Factory, Matching Powder and 2005 film The Business (also starring Dyer and written and directed by Love) ‘all quite good films’.
Marching Powder is in cinemas now.
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