Rating of
3.5/4
Pretty funny, and a good performance
TheWolf - wrote on 08/03/07
I saw this movie in the theater without knowing anything about it. I gotta say that when I saw it I was just tagging along to the movies and I didn't know what to expect. This was the first time I had seen Robert Carlyle in a movie and I thought his character and personality were brilliant from the start.
Gaz is broke, on welfare, lives in the projects, is behind on his child support and is threatened with losing his son to his ex-wife unless he can pull together 700 pounds (about $1100). But this is Sheffield, England -- once a boomtown but now a deadening city of shopping malls and garment mills, where the factories (and the guys that worked in them) are empty shells of themselves. The women have jobs; the men have job fairs. Into this comes a touring "Chippendale's" dance troupe (aimed at women only; after all, they have the spare money) and an idea is born. Gaz and some mates will strip all the way, give the ladies "the full monty", as a way to earn some quick change.
The Full Monty is its perfect balance of drama and comedy. Never does it go beyond drama toward that sappiness which haunts cinema nowadays. However, it also doesn't try to seem so light-hearted to the point of becoming as shallow as those Hollywood comedies we are so well acquainted with. In a few words, this film blends humane sensibility and the best of British humor.
