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The decibels, energy and overall quality are high in writer-director Kari Skogland's Fifty Dead Men Walking, her supremely well-made, highly stylized, graphic tale of Northern Ireland's "Troubles" in the late 1980s.
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88Setting entirely aside the accuracy of the film, the IRA still has him marked for death, and indeed there was an attempt on his life in Canada 10 years after he fled. He's still out there somewhere.
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75Sharp, well-acted film.
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It's a pretty fine film, thanks largely to the performances (and look) of its crackerjack cast, as well as Jonathan Freeman's restless, gritty cinematography and a lickety-split script.
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75Jim Sturgess (Across the Universe) makes a believable cocky lad who signs on for the con; an oddly bewigged Ben Kingsley is fussier and too actorly as his handler.
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75What makes Fifty Dead Men work is the story's sheer moral complexity, which dares viewers to sympathize with anyone onscreen for more than a few minutes at a time.
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Terrific performances and an array of kinetic action scenes help distinguish Fifty Dead Men Walking from the seemingly endless stream of films about Northern Ireland's infamous era of sectarian violence known as the Troubles.
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70A streamlined, adrenalized thriller that is not as deep as it would like to appear, treads a retrospective political tightrope.
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70A classic about the Irish "troubles." Despite the unavoidably convoluted facts of the real-life story, pic boasts plausibly written, solidly acted characters and a conflict that pushes the viewer's righteous-indignation buttons.
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60Sturgess is solid and Kingsley predictably sneaky, but the atmosphere -- scurries through the Catholic/Protestant border, tense stand-offs, spontaneous riots -- is what's genuinely gripping.
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60Think Donnie Brasco, with the IRA instead of the Mafia. Jim Sturgess dominates with a star-making turn, although some stylistic slip-ups let him down a little.
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50A richer movie might speculate on McGartland's life now. How does a local hero survive in an anonymous void?
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40Finally, at the risk of seeming provincial, why is it OK that some Canadian has made a movie set in Ireland with no Irish people among the principal cast?
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The unfitting flashiness and clunky segues between thriller and melodrama kill any real sense of tension, making this a poor man's "Donnie Brasco"--that is, if its self-congratulation and failure to contextualize the values on both sides of the ethno-political struggle didn't already make it the poor man's "Hunger."
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A muddled, talky affair, part soap opera, part undercover police procedural.
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20Kari Skogland's flashy yet dead-on-arrival drama turns Belfast's backstreet battlefields into music-video backgrounds.
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Positive: 1 out of 2
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Mixed: 0 out of 2
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Negative: 1 out of 2
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JamesM.2Done way better many many times before. This genre would need a radical approach to make it any bit interesting. Harry's game streets ahead.