Rise of the Footsoldier Part II (2015)

Carlton (Ricci Harnett), looking even more like the bastard offspring of Guy Ritchie and Peggy Mitchell, has changed little from before. The murder of his comrades preys on his mind, compounded by his heavy drug use. Leaving the circles of organised crime behind, he starts to rebuild his reputation with a small group of friends, but the bigger fish are rarely ever far away.
Harnett's default state is moody silence, which is just as well because the script is full of such, but the Carlton character is even more bare-bones than he was previously. The attempts to show that a sliver of sensitivity with regards his family exist behind the patina of hardened violence falls deathly flat. And the recurring slo-mo club scenes are an embarrassing fill in a crass and boorish story, as worthless as tits on a bull.

1½ best interests out of 5

Rise of the Footsoldier (2007)

Taking many cues from the vastly superior Goodfellas (1990), RotF is a British crime flick that documents a regular football yob's move from spilling rival blood on the terraces to unflinching murderous gangland crime, via a route that's less than subtle, to say the least. The aggressive nature of the individual in question, Carlton Leach (Ricci Harnett), is reflected in the film's shooting style, which is like a hammer to the face. The hope appears to be that the thuggish and engineered-to-shock graphic violence will help distract from the fact that Carlton and almost everything else about the film is one-note. But anyone able to see beneath the surface will likely come to the same conclusion as I did, that RotF is a story of excess that loses sight of all but one of its most base goals;. i.e. the peddling of onscreen brutality.

2½ demolition jobs out of 5