The 1995 Rettendon Range Rover murders - murky, unfinished underworld business that left three drug dealers dead on an isolated scrap of farmland outside Essex - has become to poverty-row British filmmakers what the JFK assassination or Zodiac killings have been for certain American creatives. Dig through any 24-hour garage's DVD bargain bin long enough, and you'll get to the evidence: a quick-off-the-mark post-Guy Ritchie treatment in 2000's Sean Bean vehicle Essex Boys, a lairier, post-Nick Love variant with 2010's Bonded by Blood, a clutch of lower-rent sequels to both titles, even a mildly funny spoof, rounding up the genre's usual suspects, at the beginning of 2014's otherwise best avoided The Hooligan Factory. 2007's Rise of the Footsoldier, based on a memoir by Carlton Leach, was a frenetic, not terribly convincing attempt to bolster the standard shotguns-and-swearing template with a football casual's coming-of-age story; it, too, yielded a direct-to-DVD sequel (in 2015), and now for some reason the franchise sticks its Gregory back into cinemas, with a prequel, Rise of the Footsoldier: The Pat Tate Story, centred on the most prominent of the dealers who came to a sticky end at the first film's conclusion.
A prologue set in late 80s Marbella and styled after Love's slightly underrated The Business reintroduces us to Craig Fairbrass's Tate, a hairtrigger-tempered brute with voracious appetites for power, cocaine and women ("I just want a big pair of tits in me face and a G-string in me mouth") whose downtime in the sun comes to an abrupt end after he pulls an Irreversible on a visiting ne'er-do-well with a hotel fire extinguisher. Cover and budget blown for the time being, it's back to Southend - introduced with an incongruously grandiose helicopter shot of the pier - where our Pat finds work as an enforcer at a club owned by Jamie Foreman, his nightly duties including ducking, diving, getting high on his own supplies, and inadvertently starting a war with the traveller community, represented by a ragtag group of extras, all clad in variations on the same plaid shirt. Retained from the first movie is an often comical voiceover that allows us access to the big man's thoughts at pivotal moments: as Tate phrases it, in his own unique fashion, "Anyone caught giving agg 'as to be dealt with lively."
Full confession at this point: I'd happily watch Fairbrass - the Colossus of Crap, a rare contemporary screen presence who looks as though he could actually handle himself - smashing heads together for ninety minutes, and my suspicion is that this business may still have one more notable role awaiting him. Pat Tate, alas, isn't it: this script staggers incoherently from one item on its protagonist's charge sheet to the next, prompting our Craig to bellow variations on "you dirty fuckin' wrong 'un cunt" (a favourite: "you fackin' liberty-taking shit-cunt"). Whether we're in Marbs or Souf-end or behind bars (when the film decides it actually wants to be Scum), every scene proceeds the same way: Pat has a toot, gets huffy, then shirty, then goes full-on 'roidal into the next indifferently staged ruckus. Flickers of a more parodic approach appear - an exiled Tate easing his boredom by wanking into a swimming pool, the revelation our hero faces jail time for stabbing a man with a fork in a Happy Eater, Shaun William Ryder's brief, bemused appearance as prison bigdog Mad Dog - but ultimately the franchise is here for the scrapping, shagging and swearing.
Import director Zackary Adler (The Rise of the Krays, The Fall of the Krays) looks on at all this with, at best, dead-eyed neutrality: there's something so bleakly depressing about the way the film hones in on anonymous silicone while striving to make a villain of Tate's squeeze Kate (Laura McMonagle, in the role once occupied by Kierston Wareing) for taking up with another man while Pat's serving time, the slaaaaag. (Given that the prisoner spends his conjugal visits hoovering up Charlie before taking his beloved from behind for approximately 4.7 seconds, you cannot surely blame her.) So: lairy excess coupled to sexual insecurity and inadequacy, lazily overlaid Second Summer of Love anthems (all far too good for this ropey old bollocks)... what we find huddling here, like those TB germs rumoured still to lurk in the soil around old East End burial grounds, are the last tatty traces of Nineties lad culture: the film's (admittedly modest) resources have been committed to making a Total Ledge out of the kind of slaphappy Cro-Magnon prat you wouldn't want to spend ten minutes with in the same county, let alone a cinema. Jog on, fuck off, grow up.
Rise of the Footsoldier: The Pat Tate Story opens in selected cinemas tomorrow.
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