- Critic Score
- Most active
- Publication
- Most clicked
-
80When violence eventually rears its ugly head again, the effect is as anticlimactic as the movie’s title is misleading. Brief bliss is a red herring; there’s only a lifetime of pain left in such acts’ wakes.
-
80Powerhouse performances by Liam Neeson and James Nesbit make this an intense, ultimately moving tale.
-
75The title of the overlong Fifty Dead Men Walking refers to lives saved by Sturgess' character, who is still in hiding years later.
-
An imperfect but intensely human movie that ponders the aftershock of violence, could have been an exercise in overacted sappiness. Instead, it's as hard and uncompromising as remorse.
-
75On balance, it's a good movie but not a great one. Probably the only reason it's getting North American distribution is because of the involvement of Liam Neeson.
-
75A director whose breakthrough was the story of a madman's last stand has exceeded that feat with the story of an angry man's next step.
-
Hirschbiegel fails to discipline his English-speaking cast, allowing Nesbitt so much rein with his caffeinated performance that sympathies shift to Neeson’s comparatively sanguine murderer.
-
70Captures the awful intimacy and the grimy, second-rate quality of the Northern Ireland conflict in resonant fashion.
-
Ultimately, Five Minutes of Heaven is stronger as a whole than its individual parts. It's a well-performed piece that perhaps required a more calibrated hand than Hirschbiegel's proves here.
-
67A forceful Neeson and an even more intense Nesbitt (Bloody Sunday) both show their stuff and obscure the unrelieved pain endured by the men they portray.
-
63Five Minutes of Heaven’reduces Northern Ireland’s troubles to a gimmick, but it’s an interesting gimmick, and the two men hoisted on its petard work at vivid cross-purposes. If nothing else, the film’s worth seeing as a demonstration of opposing acting techniques.
-
50Based on a true story -- that never happened. That might explain why the film circles and circles its subject but never strikes dramatic pay dirt.
-
The production design is spot-on, but Hirschbiegel tries way too hard to create tension, making every occurrence--a record needle dropping, a car door slamming--an unsubtle potential bomb, fraying your nerves like a cheap horror movie.
-
50A feature-length talkathon built on a sketchy premise, some unpersuasive psychology, a pinch of politics and strong star turns from Liam Neeson and James Nesbitt, the appeal of all those words runs out long before the director Oliver Hirschbiegel turns off the spigot.
-
20Early scenes set up the tragedy, but the majority of Oliver Hirschbiegel's movie is set in a TV studio where the two eventually face each other, and the tension, unfortunately, quickly becomes stagey.
User score distribution:
-
Positive: 2 out of 2
-
Mixed: 0 out of 2
-
Negative: 0 out of 2
-
DeborahT9This was a powerful film that left me haunted.
-
JoseC9Great performances,well directed but uneven script.