Following in an unflinchingly violent tradition - Alan Clarke's The Firm, Ricky Tognazzi's Ultra and Phil Davis's i.d. - Nick Love's movie offers further proof that cinema continues to produce far more interesting movies about football hooliganism than about the beautiful game itself.

Football is almost as peripheral as women in Love's close-up confrontation with self-declared Chelsea FC supporters boiling over with mindless, uncontrollable aggression.

The movie opens as Tommy (Danny Dyer), a south Londoner in his late 20s, lies on the ground while Millwall thugs use his head as a football, and then goes into flashback to detail the booze-and-cocaine-fuelled lives of Tommy and his mates, whose principal interests are sex and violence, although not in that order.

Love takes the adrenalin-driven style of Trainspotting as his template, pumping up the volume for an energetic soundtrack - Primal Scream, The Streets, The Jam - and for the bone-crunching sound effects of the fight scenes. His film lets the amoral, irresponsible behaviour of its adult protagonists speak for itself, and the only character to take a disapproving view is Tommy's elderly grandfather (Dudley Sutton), a war veteran.

The hallucinatory sequences depicting Tommy's intimations of doom are excessive and overbearing, but Love is much more successful at capturing and sustaining an atmosphere fraught with tension and in convincingly orchestrating the violent set-pieces. His capable leading actors perform with an aptly scary conviction.