‘Marching Powder’ is a genuine hybrid – more accurately, an enigma – which showcases Danny Dyer’s capacity for playing a villainous figure… and what follows is a classic ‘gangster with a heart of gold’ narrative about a bad guy who goes straight, whose wife stands by him every step of the way even though she has intellectually and emotionally outgrown him. The ironic thing is that Dyer’s character does not especially seem liable to want anything approximating a redemptive arc.

After committing violent acts outside a football stadium he is on the verge of going to prison, but the judge seems to treat him in the same way that Alex is given a chance of proving he can no longer act in a violent way in ‘A Clockwork Orange’. Although Dyer’s Jack is not put through a controversial re-programming procedure whereby he is not so much reformed as physically incapable of committing violence and murder, he shows little or no effort to change his ways even while out on probation. He is given work in a coffee shop, but even here it doesn’t take him long before he beats up the customers.

What makes this harder to make sense of is that Jack’s father-in-law has come into money and has paid for Jack’s son to go to private school. He lives a comfortable middle class life but has a penchant for hanging out in pubs and football stadiums where he will cheerfully and without hesitation beat up anyone he doesn’t like the look of. The MacGuffin of the judge giving him six weeks to turn his life around turns out to be a chance for Jack to carry on living a nihilistic life, until a chance opportunity to save the life of a brother-in-law leads to the same adulation and ‘hero’ status that Travis Bickle is afforded at the end of ‘Taxi Driver’ after he has murdered a pimp and tried to assassinate a presidential candidate.

If Jack is a hero he is a significantly impaired one, and it is hard therefore to see who the demographic is for this movie. It’s really a redemption movie without redemption, with Jack unrepentant at the end, unwilling to want to change, and effectively winking at the camera all the time that even when we see him going to a pub and ordering a pear juice rather than beer with his football hooligan best mates he is really just one of them, and always will be. Some critics have discerned here a white, male, misogynist, queer-, trans-, immigrant-, woke- bashing prototype which, its irreverence notwithstanding, ensures that ‘Marching Powder’ is provocative at its core.