jzappa 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.

atreus-3 From the very early scenes it is obvious that this is going to turn into a "blag gone wrong" movie.One smart criminal has recruited a "gang" of sub-normal associates. When he goes to pick up the driver we are confronted by a scene in which the drivers daughter turns up after an "all-nighter" with her policeman boyfriend. Policeman boyfriend !!!! Yeah, there's the standard father-daughter row, and from there it starts to go downhill rapidly. The dullest of the group is allotted the task of grabbing the "large" notes and proceeds to fail at this simple task, the absolute limit of 4 minutes in the target blows out through idiocy. And on and on and on .... every scene more unbelievable than the preceding one.Of course there's the obligatory "love-interest" .... the woman keeps bobbing up every ten minutes or so, nothing to do with the plot, nothing to do with anything except our mastermind's early life which is totally irrelevant. All she does is to divert from the rapidly unraveling thread of the film, but it does give you time to go and get a cup of coffee.Then the various shootouts start. Somehow the film maker got London confused with Dodge City. We have a street gunfight with the (unarmed) British police and a gunfight in a police station.Deary me. What a sad mish-mash of a movie. Unbelievable.

whoissam In 1997, I was 8 years younger and could only appreciate the soundtrack my parents bought straight after seeing this astonishing film. How come didn't I think about watching it before? I don't know. See, it was only by coming across to it on TV lately, that I got to realize how much emotion you can get from a simple movie. Face is where you see incredible braveness shining in a gray, heavy, wet atmosphere. It is when you get the sensation you are part of a story so bad you cannot even remember your own identity, and the only thing that matters is the group you are following. i would say that Face is a moment in your life you spend nowhere, a moment, alone in a lifetime, that you can even not measure precisely. No seriously, it gets inside you , no matter what time in the day and never leaves you until you hear the wonderful "standing in your shadow" song of the end. An amazing time ,thanks to a bunch of charismatic actors and a great Andrea...

dd_duke2001 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???