Full Movie

The Football Factory is more than just a study of the English obsession with football violence, its about men looking for armies to join, wars to fight and places to belong. A forgotten culture of Anglo Saxon males fed up with being told they’re not good enough and using thier fists as a drug they describe as being more potent than sex and drugs put together. Shot in documentery style with the energy and vibrancy of handheld, The Football Factory is frightingly real yet full of painful humour as the four characters extreme thoughts and actions unfold before us.

Ritchie Donovan (Dorff) is a professional thief whose luck has just run out. The only survivor from a heist that goes terribly wrong, Ritchie is forced to take the rap and is sent to Russia to steal a priceless antique cross locked in a safe on the penthouse floor of a Moscow skyscraper. Things start badly and go rapidly downhill when, during the robbery, Ritchie and his Russian accomplices are forced to take hostages because they are trapped by the police on the unused 13th floor.

A middle-aged crime boss (Malcolm McDowell) smugly reflects back from 1999, narrating the brutality which made him triumphant - and feared. As an unnamed young hood (played by Paul Bettany) in Swinging 60’s London, he seemed to ape his mod boss Freddie Mays (David Thewlis), and do anything for him. But his narration exposes all-consuming envy: of Freddie’s supremacy, and especially his tall bird (Saffron Burrows). The baby shark develops his viciousness and backstabbing, scheming to be Gangster No. 1.

A successful cocaine dealer, who has earned a respected place among England’s Mafia elite, plans an early retirement from the business. However, big boss Jimmy Price hands down a tough assignment: find Charlotte Ryder, the missing rich princess daughter of Jimmy’s old pal Edward, a powerful construction business player and gossip papers socialite. Complicating matters are two million pounds’ worth of Grade A ecstasy, a brutal neo-Nazi sect and a whole series of double crossings. The title “LAYER CAKE” refers to the layers or levels anyone in business goes through in rising to the top. What is revealed is a modern underworld where the rules have changed. There are no ‘codes’, or ‘families’ and respect lasts as long as a line. Not knowing who he can trust, he has to use all his ’savvy’, ‘telling’ and skills which make him one of the best, to escape his own. The ultimate last job, a love interest called Tammy, and an international drug ring threaten to draw him back into the ‘cake mix’. But, time is running out and the penalty will endure a lifetime..