Together with Boogie Nights, The Full Monty is one of the 1997 fall schedule's entertaining looks at the world of adult entertainment. The differences here are, The Full Monty is thoroughly British and doesn't seek to be taken the least bit seriously. Director Peter Cattaneo and writer Simon Beaufoy bring us a look at the England town of Sheffield, where the lone factory has shut down, leaving most of its working class dogs unemployed and desperate.
The ringleader of the desperate is Gaz (Robert Carlyle, not that "Butterfly Kisses" guy), who in the movie's opening scene convinces his best friend Dave (Mark Addy) and his young son to sneak into the closed factory with him and steal some steel (or steel some steal) girders. The security guard locks them in and they end up trapped on the roof of a waterlogged car. We learn right quick that every crazy scheme Gaz comes up with, the people around him are dumb enough to go along with.
That night, Gaz sends his son into a strip club on ladies' night to check up on Dave's wife, who with a few hundred other women is going nuts over the Chippendales. The next day on the unemployment line, Gaz, Dave and the other ex-factory workers do their usual bitching about the hard times in Sheffield. They find one man (Steve Huison) trying to kill himself in a car, and have a conversation with him about other options for ending his life (he says he can't drown himself because he doesn't know how to swim) before a light bulb goes off in Gaz's head.
The solution to their money problems is to strip for a living, only, unlike the buff Chippendales, they're going to show off the full monty. The whole package. The stocking and the ornaments. The rest of the movie chronicles Gaz's idea from inception to reality. Auditions are held, and a core group of two more men is formed, in addition to Gaz, Dave, the suicide guy and their ex-foreman (Tom Wilkinson).
The foreman is the only one among them who knows how to dance, and after turning Gaz down in the requisite "p*ss off" scenes, he finally relents when Gaz finds out the foreman hasn't told his wife he's out of work. So the foreman teaches them some routines, all incredibly bad, and they all get red leather thongs. The audition scenes, the rehearsal scenes, and especially the scene when the men are standing in line and "Hot Stuff" comes over the intercom, all are hilarious, in that PBS, British sort of way.
The Full Monty isn't classy but it does entertain, and even offers a few dramatic subplots. Gaz's ex-wife and her boyfriend want to take all custody from him because he's an unfit father (and, seeing how he includes his son in every step of this strip plan, that's not a far-fetched notion), Dave doesn't want to strip because he's fat, and there's always the melodrama of the red leather thongs. The Full Monty is the kind of import I can easily endorse, both the stocking and the ornaments.
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