Murder of the Essex Boys: Blood and Betrayal review – a real-life rogues’ gallery

In 2007, the profitable and entertaining low-budget film Rise of the Footsoldier kicked off an entire Footsoldier franchise, whose title became a byword for a particular kind British gangster flick, high on baseball bats and Stanley knives and low on diplomatic conflict-resolution. Several of the Footsoldier films feature fictionalised versions of the real life drug dealers Pat Tate, Tony Tucker and Craig Rolfe, whose bodies were discovered by a local farmer in 1995, having been shot at point blank range in a 4×4 in a quiet part of Essex.

This new documentary aims to explore the ins-and-outs of the so-called “Range Rover murders”, which have been subject to conspiracy theories and wild speculation ever since. Director Trevor Drane has assembled quite the rogues’ gallery in order to pin down the various allegiances and backstories of the network of crims, reformed crims, ex-doormen and generally dodgy geezers that populated the hardman scene in 1990s Essex (some of whom are apparently quite happy to be credited today with a job description as “Essex Criminals”). While the majority of the runtime is taken up with talking head interviews, there are also various on-screen graphics showing links wherever possible back to luminaries such as the Kray twins.

The overall effect is something like spending time in the pub with some amiable fellas telling you all about the good old days. The worlds they describe don’t sound massively appealing, but they recall them quite fondly. The problem is that although the events being picked over were evidently all very dramatic at the time, the documentary itself is a fairly route-one assembly of the various accounts, with lots of slightly repetitive chat about various allegiances, drug addictions and unwise business deals. It will certainly be of some interest to those who have followed the case closely, but by the time it finishes, a less niche audience will be left thinking they might have been better off looking out the 97th Rise of the Footsoldier film.