Tim Kidner The DVD, in photos online, tell you nothing. (I watched it late night, BBC2). Firstly, it's written/directed by Limerick born David Gleeson (this is his 2nd feature), is set in Dublin, 93mins long and stars Eriq Ebouaney and James Frain.Ebouaney plays a Congolese immigrant, who has escaped a violent past in his homeland. He's brought his wife over and they have a young girl. He's found work as a security guard at a bank but past events come back to haunt him, when Irish thug Frain and his gang kidnap his family - all he has to do is be the insider for them robbing his bank.It's a polished and modern production, with lots of moody lighting, booming bass thuds and prowling camera, so, so far, so good. As a heist movie, it's OK but that tired formula needs a bit more to get a movie standing out above the rest. Ebouaney helps this, he is both convincing as the new citizen trying to lead a good life and as a human being out of his depth. Frain has less screen presence but is suitably psychotic where he should be.The whole thing moves along pretty quickly - in just over half an hour, they're already inside the bank vaults. It's also great to see a different city and its streets to the usual as a setting.Such crime thrillers aren't my staple film diet so The Front Line will never make any of my top anything lists. However, if such are, you could do a lot worse than this one for a mid-week rental or if you can find it on Sky somewhere. At the price here, it's just not worth it, though.

johnnyboyz It's Guy Ritichie does Hotel Rwanda with splashes of the workmanlike 2000 Elmore Leonard novel "Pagan Babies" thrown in. Although to be fair, I'm fairly sure Irish writer/director for The Front Line David Gleeson didn't pitch it like that; moreover, the piece is a 'what if....?' project - a 'what if.....?' thuggish Irish mobsters, who'll no sooner kill you in ways that are terrifying and excruciating like you switch on a light, went up against hardened African warlord-types whom are hiding out in western Europe and have been responsible for some of the most senseless and most disturbing acts of a Civil War you're likely to see. Alas, the film is all too keen to test such a hypothesis; not a bad film, but an erratic one that leaps from intelligent low-level living immigration drama to heist movie to something resembling a cop show that looks like it was just plucked from a TV screen. Chuck in some swooping, often night-set, shots of cityscapes evoking the likes of better films within the genre, such as 1995's "Heat", and you have an admirable at best, all over the place at worst, piece which takes several cues from several things whilst biting off more than it can chew, but doing its utmost in the process.I looked Gleeson up and found an interview from around the time of The Front Line's release; I'm in admiration of what the man's done and is presently doing, that is to say writing and producing, with his own company, varying films along varying lines. Quite clearly, The Front Line has been made with the best of intentions and it would be nice to get behind the man and his actions because of his predicament, but one cannot help but feel it falls a little short. Eriq Ebouaney plays a Congolese immigrant named Joe Yumba who's seeking asylum in Dublin, a man with what appears to be a family consisting of a wife and a son as well as a chequered back-story involving taking sides in a specific Civil War which erupted in his native land. We can tell he feels for them in a specific way and that they have suffered together as a three via Gleeson's use of a memento in the form of a cassette tape overlying his bond to his son. This, while echoed voices and rapid flashbacks to nastier past times puts across the characteristics of a post-trauma.The man initially occupies a grotty hostel for foreigners whilst still awaiting clearance from the government – during this, we catch glimpses what he has fled, namely hostilities and violence of a relatively shocking magnitude. In this regard, and long by the time he has been garnered entry; allowed to have the rest of his family come over; placed in some housing and then have granted to him a job in a local bank as a security guard, we don't assume him to be much of a slouch when it comes to living the hard graft. After some teasing with a drawn out sequence involving bank vault codes and the reiteration of how secretive and important everything down there in that bank within which Joe works is, Gleeson confirms what already became somewhat obvious when he has Joe snatched from the streets and told by one of the more talkative of several local mobsters that he will aid them as their inside man in a bank robbery or have his family, whom have been kidnapped, killed.Thus begins Joe's quest to do something brave and heroic in trying to save a life, two in fact, when in the past he worked with certain other men, of whom have additionally fled to Dublin, in trying to end lives. The talkative gangster, James Frain's Eddie, does not strike us as the sort of person one crosses in as much it is established he's killed police officers in the past and has some of the more fruiter ideas for interrogation of which cross-pollinate with hard fetishism. The film, effectively a continuation of a tale of redemption which follows the protagonist on from the African continent, uses its premise to weave a tale that is mostly good value, if curiously uninteresting on the whole. The film has more fun depicting than we do following Joe doing his best to try and restore some parity to his situation; the police, led by a Detective Inspector named Harbison (McSorley), get in on the act a little more we would've liked as they try to apprehend a man in Joe they were already suspicious of, while a bigoted bank live-in caretaker has the revision of his racist beliefs wedged in there amongst all of it. I admire the film's pulpy, cut down attitude to the majority of its material but a lot of it sits uneasily with everything else. You can sense there is an idea buried in there somewhere; that there is a mind at work taking something along the lines of a heist formula, whilst trying to encompass true-to-life tragedies always difficult to deal with, and attempting to etch something out engaging and something fresh where there really ought not be. Alas, the film is an admirable failure; a piece tempting you into checking out other work by that of the chief contributers, but on the whole having you wish everything had come together just that tiny bit more adeptly.

anxietyresister What a strange film. It begins as a crime thriller and ends up becoming an indictment against war in Africa; in my opinion it is far more successful at the former.An asylum seeker fleeing the fighting in the Congo, gets a job at a security guard in a bank in Eire. He seems a trustworthy sorta fella, however, his wife and child have gone missing in London. When the authorities track them down and grant them all leave to stay, it's seems it will be a happy ending after all. But when an Irish gang kidnap the guy's family in order to get him to cooperate in a little heist they have planned, they don't count on his resilience. As well as a few skeletons he has in the closet that could have them think twice..No-one's behaviour in this film makes any sense! Character's personalities change at the drop of a hat, and seemingly intelligent people make some stupid decisions for no other reason then to add some spice to the plot. Unfortunately this shoddy scriptwriting cripples our interest in the second half of the film, with one 'outrageous' revelation after another resulting in a forced tragic ending.Shame, because the opening scenes are very promising, with Eriq Ebouaney portraying a very sympathetic hero, and Fatou N'Diaye also impressive as his deceptively strong partner. Perhaps the film have been better if the movie had been about their reintegration into a new culture after surviving a traumatic ordeal in a war-torn environment.But no, we get the classic stereotypical gang of chirpy Irish hoodlums, a botched bank raid and then the bloody aftermath, which is where things really come off the rails. There isn't a single event that occurs in the last half an hour that convinces, not one happening that doesn't feel tacked on and absolutely zero elements that aren't stolen from better movies.Just because a film has a humanistic social agenda it doesn't give it the right to be this lacklustre. Someone should have taken the first twenty pages of this script, developed the plot from there are thrown the rest of it on the fire. In my opinion, anyway. What could have been, we'll never know.. 4/10

jamesbond000 Who would have thought it possible? A shoot-em-up with serious soul. Writer/director David Gleeson's decision to offer Dublin-based heist-movie THE FRONT LINE as his attempt to build on the promise shown in his debut, COWBOYS & ANGELS, might initially have smacked of the formulaic. But the good news is that the end product bristles with freshness and cinematic sophistication.There's nothing new about a heist movie with a hard edge, but THE FRONT LINE comes with a hard edge and considerable heart.Convincing performances and visually strong production values ensure the thriller aspect of the first half will bring you to the edge of the seat. Unlike so many comparable efforts, however, THE FRONT LINE gives you something to think about when you get there.Just as it seems inevitable that entertainment levels will flag, disturbing revelations about Joe's true identity elevate proceedings to an absorbing consideration of that most fertile of territories for great art – the sometimes thin line between the divine and the depraved.Ebouaney and McSorley are strikingly good in the central roles, and while some of the observances about Dublin-based gangsters seem a tad far-fetched, this is but a minor quibble.Gleeson has delivered a terrific film that reminds us what big screens were made for.