Bruiser (2000) from Johnny Web (Uncle Scoopy; Greg Wroblewski) and Tuna

Scoop's comments in white, written in 2000:

I don't know about you guys, but I didn't even know that George A. Romero was still making films. He sure doesn't make many. Prior to Bruiser, he hadn't made one in seven years, and from 1989 to 1999, he directed exactly one feature, 1993's The Dark Half. 

Henry Creedlow has always been a faceless non-entity. He's not just a nobody like most of us, but he's also a complete wimp. He's the ultimate "mark". His abusive boss makes fun of him to his face, in front of his co-workers. His wife is having an affair with that very same slimebag boss. His best childhood friend is his investment consultant who and is ripping him off for tens of thousands of dollars. Henry fantasizes about striking back at people who mistreat him, but he never does.

As if all that weren't bad enough, he wakes up one day without a face. He goes from being a figuratively faceless non-entity to a literally faceless one. Where his face used to be, there is a nearly featureless porcelain mask which can't be removed. As his initial terror diminishes, he realizes that he has allowed all the people in his life to steal his manhood, and even his very identity. The only way to get his face back, he reasons, is to make himself a whole person again.

So far, excellent!

There wasn't even a lot of detecting to do, since Henry called into radio talk shows and confessed the details of his crimes.

Pity Romero couldn't figure out a more creative way for the faceless man to get his face back. 

Bruiser is a George Romero film funded by French Canal + and made in Ontario on a very small budget. It is meant as a commentary on the dehumanizing effects of industry on the common man. Henry Creedlow (Jason Flemyng) has a real bad day. He lives in an unfinished house, and his breakfast is disrupted by an obnoxious poodle, and a wife who won't get up. She clearly has little or no use for him. His best friend and financial planner picks him up on the way to the train station, and shows him his portfolio, which is not doing as well as he expected. His boss at Bruiser Magazine, Milo (Peter Stormare), makes an ass out of him at a morning meeting. He is turned down for a Gold Card because he is undercapitalized.

Then, at a BBQ at Milo's mansion, Milo's estranged wife makes a mask of his face, and tells him to decorate it. He then observes his wife giving Milo a hand job out in the open. She dumps him at home and leaves. In the morning, he discovers that the cleaning woman has been stealing from them, and hits her. She is dead on the floor, and he finds that his face is a blank mask he can't remove. For the rest of the film, he gets even with those who ruined his life, and the mask slowly turns back into him.

All in all, not a terrible concept.

Unfortunately, I was not entirely impressed with the execution.  Flemyng's performance was clearly hampered by the mask and Stormare was typically way over the top. More important than those facts is the script's inherent empathy problem. Since the masked man would eventually be doing really awful things to those who had wronged him, it was necessary to make everyone else in the film so obviously evil that we could still  empathize with Henry. The net result is a film full of people you hate, except for one with a featureless plastic face.