WHAT else you gonna do on a Saturday?, asks Tommy Johnson, anti-hero of The Football Factory. Well, Tommy, you could watch the game, but Tommy is more interested in knocking the hell out of rival hooligans.

John King's novel, wherein Chelsea's Headhunters clash with Millwall's Bushwhackers on FA Cup 3rd Round day, has been turned into a brutal film that is foul-mouthed, ferocious, scary and disturbing but disarmingly amusing in its scabrous humour.

For director and Millwall fan Nick Love, The Football Factory is "a football boy's dream, unashamedly aimed at the people it is about: men who do not want to grow up".

These words are sure to upset the Football Association mandarins ahead of this summer's Euro 2004 tournament in Portugal, but in reality Love is being no more provocative - or socially irresponsible - than novelist Irvine Welsh or director Danny Boyle in Trainspotting or writer-director Justin Kerrigan in his Friday night tale of Cardiff drug culture, Human Traffic.

Danny Dyer, from Human Traffic, plays Cockney geezer Tommy Johnson, runner for the Chelsea firm's hardest nut, Billy Bright (Frank Harper), who drives around in a Range Rover from his drug-dealing at his florist warehouse. Tommy is on the cusp of 30; work is a chore; chasing Friday night girls on booze and pills sends him to sleep on the job; the drugs are turning him paranoid.

He is even receiving a vicious, bloody-faced kicking in a recurring nightmare that King shows again and again in close detail. No matter the suffering, Tommy will always seek out his only regular buzz: the Saturday scrap with opposing hooligan firms that are organised with neo-military precision on mobile phones.

His journey forms the narrative drive of The Football Factory, and while it would be wrong to call it a rites of passage to self-knowledge, at least he is shown to be a troubled soul, even if he ultimately concludes boll**** to all that. Billy Bright, by comparison, is beyond redemption, bloated on coke and gorging on violence.

As told by Johnson, rather than writer-director Love, there is no moral overview to The Football Factory. Instead it is a British film in the manner of Trainspotting, Quadrophenia and Human Traffic, a film from the wrong side of the tracks pumped up on fast editing and a punk soundtrack.

Not once is a game of football on screen, so you are left to conclude that the fighting is an end itself.

Updated: 08:57 Friday, May 14, 2004