Reviewed - The Frontline: David Gleeson, the Limerick-born director of Cowboys & Angels, has followed up that diverting 2003 comedy with a serious thriller set among the African communities in Dublin.
The picture focuses on Joe, a Congolese security guard who, after allowing a woman and her child to enter the country posing as his own family, sees the unfortunate arrivals kidnapped by local hoodlums keen to blackmail the hero into helping them rob a bank.
The director has, presumably, set out to reveal hitherto hidden aspects of the immigrant experience to a largely white audience.
Assisted by a fine central performance from Eriq Ebouaney, The Front Line does a decent job of communicating some of the traumas experienced by asylum seekers. Snatching footage in Dublin's busiest streets, Gleeson is equally adept at communicating how disturbingly foreign the capital must appear to new immigrants.
But what are we to make of the film's faltering exercise in genre? Representatives of the African underworld - more placid than their Irish counterparts - come across like characters from a lost blaxploitation film.
The bank robbery, sadly, looks like it cost no more to film than it must have cost to film. And much of the hard-man dialogue flows as smoothly as coal flows through macaroni. At one stage a police officer accuses the protagonist of "associating with a known scumbag" in a manner that suggests this is now a specific statutory offence.
For all that, The Front Line - whose consistently fine black cast deserves particular praise - remains a tolerably absorbing drama. As events progress it becomes apparent that the hero is not who he says he is, and the dignified Ebouaney conveys Joe's accumulating desperation very movingly.
It is probably not Gleeson's fault that the denouement is so uncomfortably reminiscent of required sequences from a more trivial species of film. Something terrible happened to Joe and made him behave as he does. The revelatory sequence is convincingly played, but, as it progresses, it becomes increasingly hard to resist a facetious voice in your head: "So, that's how he became Batman."
