Janae Milner Easily the biggest piece of Right wing non sense propaganda I ever saw.

Philippa All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

Dana An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

Billy Ollie Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

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.

lastliberal James Frain (Sunshine, Reindeer Games) plays what is probably the most vicious criminal around. He forces Eriq Ebouaney (Hitman, Crimson Rivers 2: Angels of the Apocalypse), a bank security guard, to assist him in a robbery or his family will suffer. The cops are on him almost immediately, but he can't talk.They take his wife (Fatou N'Diaye) and son as hostages, and he lets them into the bank, but they were not prepared for his next step.His past was not something they were prepared to deal with, and he used it to bring his full fury down on them and save his boy. He is assisted by some countrymen who also know what to do with a knitting needle and Viagra.His boy safe, the ghost of Father Joseph will exact retribution once again.

dfgrayb What starts off looking like a routine action thriller about a bank heist gradually becomes something much more. Eriq Ebouaney is a security guard at a bank, whose family is kidnapped to force him to assist in the robbery.The film is in many respects a revisiting of the John Wayne/John Ford classic The Searchers, in that the viewer gradually realizes that the ostensible plot (the bank robbery) is not really at the center of the film. Just as in The Searchers, where the film is really about Wayne's search to find his own humanity and not his niece who has been captured by the Comanches, so too in The Front Line, Ebouaney's pursuit to rescue his family is his search to find his own redemption as a human being. Over the course of the film, because of the fine performances and direction, we are drawn into Ebouaney's internal pain and love, and we almost want to say to him "Be at peace. Your soul is good." This is a remarkable and moving film. Successful on many levels. Ebouaney's performance is stunning. The plot, which begins as a bank robbery, becomes a story that is breathtakingly beautiful, powerful, and unforgettable.

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.