The Front Line Review (Sunday Business Post)

Dir: David Gleeson

Review: Jonathan McCrea

“It was really good wasn’t it?”, an elderly lady loudly announced to her companion upon exiting the premiere of The Front Line, “It wasn’t anything like an Irish film”. David Gleeson, the Limerick-born director of the film, acknowledges it’s not the first time has heard that about his work. His latest film is slick, well lit and scored beautifully. ‘Irish films can generally be summed up with three words: tricolour, dogcollars and bog’ he muses, referring to the Irish obsession with republicanism, the Church and rural Ireland, ‘I wanted to do something different’.
Set in the present day in Dublin, the film introduces us to Joe Yumba (Eriq Ebouaney), a refugee from the Congo seeking politcal asylum from the terrors that plague his country. Under the watchful eye of a suspicious detective Harbison (Gerard McSorley, Omagh, Veronica Guerin ) he soon settles down and gets a job as the security guard in a bank. He’s only there a week when notorious Dublin gangster Eddie Gilroy (James Frain) kidnaps his wife and child in order to coerce him into helping his gang with a bank raid. But neither Gilroy and his goons nor the ever-present gardaí know the African’s true identity nor his boundaries.
The opening sequence is a montage of news footage of the civil war in Brazaville, a first hint that The Front Line is going to be a far more bleak outing than Gleeson’s feature debut Cowboys and Angels. Still, the two films have a lot in common. Both were produced by Gleeson’s wife Nathalie Lichtenthaeler, financed with German money and, as part of the deal, shot by German crews. Hardly surprising then that the film doesn’t look Irish. Dublin, like Limerick in ‘Cowboys’, is presented in an entirely new light as Gleeson manages to create the illusion of a sprawling metropolis with a sinister underbelly.
The story itself suffers from a slight identity crisis – somehow Harrison Ford’s recent Firewall meets Hotel Rwanda on Henry St. At one point we come close to witnessing a torture scene matching anything as scarring Scorcese had to offer, at another we somberly contemplate the disaster in war-torn Congo . The director freely admits he was initially against making an out-and-out genre piece; this is apparent in the playing down of violence and his refusal to allow pace to carry the film. It’s here though that audiences will be divided. Those looking for the thrill of a gangster flick may feel great potential was squandered. The rest will probably welcome the decision to make a film with a little more depth as Joe’s history comes to the fore.
The casting process for the film was unusual to say the least. Having struggled to find an anglophone African through the usual paths, he discovered the Ebouaney as he passed by a video store in Berlin and saw his face on the front cover of a DVD. Six days later he had himself a lead man. For the monstrous Eddie Gilroy, he invited James Frain to the project without audition, though the actor had never played a Dubliner. The first gamble paid off pretty well but the second may have come up snake eyes. A decent enough actor who has proved himself with his TV work in 24 and Invasion, Frain toils with the Dublin accent, losing some of his malice in the process.
This, and a few other minor flaws like the numerous endings to the film, prevent The Front Line from being a ground-breaking piece of Irish cinema, but its strengths far outway its weaknesses.