Rise of the Footsoldier: Origins ★★
THERE is a small sub-genre of British films that can be accused of glorifying real-life criminals.
Chief among them is the Rise of the Footsoldier franchise which has to date resulted in five films.
The stories are based on the lives, and alleged exploits, of gangster Carlton Leach, who is still alive, and drug dealers Pat Tate and Tony Tucker who aren’t, having both been gunned down in 1995.
It’s an odd series of films – engaging and exciting at times but more often just ridiculous and exploitative with violence for the sake of it and usually depicting unfair, surprise attacks involving bashing, head-butting, glassing or stabbing with the occasional shooting thrown in.
No doubt all these characters were partly products of their upbringing which resulted in them being bullies at school and devolving into football hooligans and eventually criminal alpha-males.
The origin story of how Tucker, Rolfie, and Pat Tate unite to form their own firm.
The first film, which focused primarily on Leach with Tate and Tucker as support characters who end up murdered at the end. But, after the second film, the producers and writers seemed to become bored with Leach and decided instead to focus on the earlier exploits of Tate and Tucker.
This resulted in three prequels, the latest of which is 2021’s Rise of the Footsoldier: Origins which centres on Tucker’s return from the Falklands War where he served in the army, and descent into violent crime and drugs in cahoots with the psychotic Tate and another slippery drug dealer named Craig Rolfe.
Terry Stone and Craig Fairbrass have respectively played Tate and Tucker now for many years and should have them off pat by now, but the acting in the franchise has always been uneven, particularly when Stone is again forced to don a ridiculous wig in a forlorn cheap way of trying to make him look younger.
Vinnie Jones joins the franchise for this fifth outing and brings exactly what you would expect to the proceedings.
You either like or hate this kind of exploitative material.