John Chard@John Chard
Sick As A Dog.
Directed by Martin Kemp and written by Dougie Brimson, Top Dog stars Leo Gregory, Ricci Harnett, Vincent Regan, Danielle Brent and Lorraine Stanley. Plot finds Gregory as a top London football hooligan who bites off more than he can chew when he muscles in on a gangster's racket action.
The British hooligan film band wagon rolls on these days regardless of quality. Where once was a viable space for these genre films to create interest and a bit of shock and awe, now is an area crammed with lads movies for lads movies sake. Top Dog is a poor film, full of half hearted performances, where most the cast realise it's once again just easy money to be made, limp direction (poor fight scenes and cheese dialogue), and a screenplay that simply adds nothing new to the over stuffed clichéd topics to hand - insultingly the audience gets to know practically nothing about the main players.
It will of course have found an audience, we know this because stuff like this keeps getting made, but the high wire days of The Football Factory (2004) and Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998) now seem very far away. 3/10