Waste of time

Good idea lost in the noise

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

There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.

Ray is an ex-socialist who has become a bank-robber after seeing the demise of socialism in 1980s Britain.Teaming up with a gang of other working class criminals, he commits one bank job too many.The gang dissolves in a murderous flurry of recriminations....Birds movie does have flashes of genius, but it does feature too heavy on subliminal socialist propaganda, from the blink and you'll miss it graffiti, to the Ken Loach posters strewn over Rays home.Other than that, it's a solid smoke and mirrors crime movie, sadly shadowed by the slew of Ritchie-esque capers that followed for the next few years.Released near enough at the same time as The Full Monty, yearning to cash in on Carlyle, the film is a different beast altogether. It does have the family struggles that both movies feature, but Carlyle is the only thing that these two movies have in common.The cast are great, and the movie is wonderful right until the final act, when they decide to go all Hollywood with the police siege.With a brilliant soundtrack that epitomises the nineties, if you were not at a certain age at the time of it's release, Face could go well over your head, as just another Geezers in peril yarn.It's so much more intricate than that though.well worth seeing.

Face is among the subgenre of movies that can still blindside me with severe mediocrity. There are intermittent times when I simply cannot resist a cheeky gangster flick, and Face is one of the candygrams that blows up in your face. There's nothing inherently wrong with the story except that it has been used more times than a hooker's hanky, the basic premise anyway.The film begins with Robert Carlyle and Ray Winstone, two of England's great screen badasses, breaking into a drug dealer's apartment, posing as police officers in order to raid his cash and his stash. The next scene begins the unfolding of the mainline of the plot, a bank robbery. And they have their logistics man, Robert Carlyle's old friend from prison, et cetera. Then the third event in the film is the inevitable betrayal within the heist crew. And of course there's Carlyle's nagging, guilt-laying girlfriend. I've always wondered what else will happen in a crime film whenever the story's pivotal heist occurs in the first twenty minutes other than betrayals and nagging token female characters. These filmmakers don't seem to have shared my curiosity.Aside from a small portion of time given to Carlyle's backstory as a war protester, Face is just another recycled crime flick for teenagers telling the age-old tale of a group of violent criminals and what happens to them after they steal a lot of money. It even employs another thriller gimmick: It's set over the course of 48 hours in and around the city, in this case London. What director Antonia Bird, who did later direct a decent Robert Carlyle movie called Ravenous, tries to do is gloss the film with grunge, badassery and style as a substitute for expanding on what she pulled off the assembly line, one of the results of this choice being a soundtrack that is unusually bad for an English gangster film.I'm sure I'm not being fair enough to this movie. There are several assembly line movies that are entertaining enough, but frankly I don't feel that requires an explanation that differentiates between this and them. To me, if you're making an insincere movie, the audience has the right to be subjective. Whether one considers it a good movie or not is now pure luck. With Face, I was bored and cynical. If it were on TV on a lazy day or when I need to kill a little time, I might stay for a few minutes of the shootout in the street (in which you can briefly hear an unmistakable soundbite of Tim Roth's wailing early in Reservoir Dogs), or for one good if very brief scene, where Carlyle is comforted by Winstone by hugging him when he's crying.

This is a great and completely overlooked film. I love heist movies, but most of them is quite shallow and under developed in the use of characters. So I must say I was well impressed when I found this film by chance. An intelligent and very impressive film, why isn't more films of this quality being made in Britain???

"Face" is a gritty, bloody, visceral tale of a motley crew of professional robbers led by Carlyle and what happens when someone systematically steals their ill gotten gains. Carlyle and others deliver powerful performances in this drab, bleak action/drama about treachery, larceny, retribution, and the disintegration of a gang of thieves. Save a few plot holes, "Face" manages solid entertainment for those who can overlook the fact that the protagonist/hero is a thief and a killer.