'71

Name: '71
Genre: Action, Drama, Thriller, War
Released: February 27, 2015
Duration: 99 min
Rating: 83
Cast: Charlie Murphy, Jack O'Connell, Paul Anderson, Paul Popplewell, Sam Hazeldine

2015

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Universal acclaim based on 34 Critic Reviews

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USER SCORE

Generally favorable reviews based on 146 Ratings

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7.5	User Score Generally favorable reviews based on 146 Ratings

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'71

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Movie Details & Credits

Roadside Attractions | Release Date: February 27, 2015 | R

Starring: Charlie Murphy, Jack O'Connell, Paul Anderson, Paul Popplewell, Sam Hazeldine, Sam Reid, Sean Harris

Summary: ’71 takes place over a single night in the life of a young British soldier (Jack O’Connell) accidentally abandoned by his unit following a riot on the streets of Belfast in 1971. Unable to tell friend from foe, and increasingly wary of his own comrades, he must survive the night alone and find his way to safety through a disorientating,’71 takes place over a single night in the life of a young British soldier (Jack O’Connell) accidentally abandoned by his unit following a riot on the streets of Belfast in 1971. Unable to tell friend from foe, and increasingly wary of his own comrades, he must survive the night alone and find his way to safety through a disorientating, alien and deadly landscape.… Expand

Director: Yann Demange

Genre(s): Action, Drama, Thriller, War

Rating: R

Runtime: 99 min

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Critic Reviews

100

Michael Phillips

Mar 12, 2015

Swift and exciting, with no taste for the usual war movie heroics, first-time feature film director Yann Demange's film belongs on a short list of immersive, rattling, authentic fictions right next door to the fact of survival inside a war zone. Read full review

Leslie Felperin

Feb 12, 2014

This outstanding, muscular feature debut for French-born, British-based director Yann Demange almost never puts a foot wrong, from the softly underplayed performances to the splendidly speckled cinematography and fine-grained period detailing. Read full review

Kenneth Turan

Feb 26, 2015

Nothing is extraneous, no moment that doesn't enhance the tension of this nightmare scenario is allowed to survive, until the proceedings become, in the best possible sense, almost unbearable to watch. Read full review

Mike D'Angelo

Feb 25, 2015

The setting may be Belfast ’71, but Demange’s sensibility — first-rate suspense coupled with black-and-white politics — is much more James Cameron ’86. Read full review

Andrew O'Hehir

Feb 26, 2015

It’s a riveting, man-on-the-run genre movie, almost a combination of “Black Hawk Down” and “After Hours,” rather than an allegory or a historical treatise. Read full review

Empire Nev Pierce

Oct 6, 2014

The villainy is, perhaps unavoidably, somewhat signposted, but this is a tense, gripping thriller that combines real-world relevance with high-concept entertainment. In a superb ensemble, O’Connell is outstanding. Read full review

Time Out London Dave Calhoun

Oct 7, 2014

Demange is a strong storyteller and masks the script’s tendency to nod to every opinion and social division by offering a masterclass in tension as soon as his dramatic bomb starts ticking. Read full review

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User Reviews

DoUEvnLft

Mar 1, 2015

One of the most intense and deeply immersive films I've ever watched. I would wholeheartedly recommend this film to anyone with even a passing interest in war films.

5 of 7 users found this helpful52

hapycampr2002

Sep 7, 2015

Great movie. I read complaints about the accents and the fact that you don't know who the "good guys" are. That could only have been written by an American. After I watched it I was grateful that it wasn't produced by or solely for an American audience because it would have been dumbedGreat movie. I read complaints about the accents and the fact that you don't know who the "good guys" are. That could only have been written by an American. After I watched it I was grateful that it wasn't produced by or solely for an American audience because it would have been dumbed down considerably. Smartly written and very well acted. A roller coaster of a movie that seemed to never let up. I laud the fact that this film did not take sides and has a nuanced approach to what it addressed regarding the conflict in Norther Ireland. I've read my fair share on it, and it was a quagmire of competing forces that sometimes found the same sides pitted against one another. This movie showed that.… Expand

0 of 0 users found this helpful00

MovieMasterEddy

Apr 6, 2016

In “ ’71,” an excitingly jumpy, finely calibrated chase movie about a British soldier caught behind enemy lines, the director Yann Demange goes from zero to 100 in the blink of an eye. The soldier is played by Jack O’Connell, last seen being brutalized (in more ways than one) in “Unbroken,”In “ ’71,” an excitingly jumpy, finely calibrated chase movie about a British soldier caught behind enemy lines, the director Yann Demange goes from zero to 100 in the blink of an eye. The soldier is played by Jack O’Connell, last seen being brutalized (in more ways than one) in “Unbroken,” the Angelina Jolie biopic about Louis Zamperini. That movie proved a bad fit for Mr. O’Connell, who never put down roots in the character, an Olympian turned World War II captive, because Ms. Jolie couldn’t or wouldn’t let him. By contrast, Mr. O’Connell runs away with “ ’71,” in which his character’s every emotional, psychological and physical hurdle makes for kinetic cinema.

I mean run literally. The movie is set against the sectarian violence in Belfast, Northern Ireland, in a year that opened with the tarring and feathering of several men by the Irish Republican Army. By February, a British soldier was dead as were a number of civilians, and several riots had convulsed Belfast. It’s against this backdrop that Mr. O’Connell’s character, Gary Hook, arrives with a regiment of similarly inexperienced soldiers. Smoke pours from burning cars, some strategically bookending streets like barricades. During the day, children play among scattered bricks that they sometimes hurl at the soldiers (when they’re not lobbing bags of feces instead). At night, the mazelike streets belong to the war and the running people, British and Irish, stoking the flames.

When you meet Gary, he’s a wide-eyed recruit on the receiving end of another man’s fists. He doesn’t talk much. The movie, written by the playwright Gregory Burke, favors narrative devices like foreshadowing and doubling over the usual blabbity blab, an approach that dovetails with Mr. Demange’s talent for elegantly deployed action. The blood that pours from Gary’s face bluntly sets the scene but also foreshadows the river of red to come. Similarly, the obstacle course that Gary and his fellow soldiers soon run, leaping and going belly down in the muck, forecasts the more punishing hurdles to come. Meanwhile, a short, elliptical sequence of Gary and his young brother, Darren (Harry Verity), adds some personal detail even as it presages the later appearance of a second boy.

That may sound too schematic, but Mr. Demange moves so effortlessly and rapidly from these introductory interludes that you may not notice all the parts shifting into gear. He knows when to linger in the moment, too, as when Gary watches Darren at a home for children, a place that, you intuit, the older brother knows inch by loveless inch.

You never learn why or how the brothers came to this sterile holding pen. As the story unfolds, though, you wonder if being parentless explains the seriousness of Gary’s gaze and his mournfulness. His immaturity and the military may explain his reserve, but it’s also a good guess that his survival instincts were honed in that home.

Men and women have been sprinting across screens since Eadweard Muybridge turned his cameras on them in the late 19th century. The silent clowns ran as does Jason Bourne, and, at times, it seems as if the movies were made for ready, set, go, go, go: Buster Keaton bolting in “Seven Chances”; Cary Grant fleeing in “North by Northwest”; Franka Potente racing in “Run Lola Run.” Mr. Demange makes his feature directing debut with “ ’71,” but he already knows how to move bodies through space and the complex choreography that he’s worked out in this movie is a thing of joy. One minute, Gary is ripping down an alley with the camera jostling after him, as if desperate to keep up; the next, he’s careering down a street, the camera now steadily gliding alongside him.

Much of the movie takes place in a single night, which certainly worked for James Joyce in “Ulysses.” Whether or not the filmmakers self-consciously borrowed from that book’s chapter set during one hallucinatory Dublin evening, Gary’s journey into this other night-town is similarly a voyage into the self. In between sprints — he’s soon fleeing a breakaway faction of the I.R.A., led by an eager killer, Quinn (Killian Scott) — he meets several souls who help him out, sometimes a bit too conveniently, including a father and daughter, Eamon (Richard Dormer) and Brigid (Charlie Murphy). What Gary doesn’t know is that the biggest threat may come in the form of an undercover British unit led by a twitchy captain, Browning (a ferocious Sean Harris). The enemy of Gary’s enemy is closing in.… Expand

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TheFilmDoctor

Mar 22, 2016

What might a movie called ’71 be about? The Pentagon Papers? War between India and Pakistan? The release of Led Zeppelin’s untitled fourth album? Had director Yann Demange taken a cue from Vincent Gallo (Buffalo ’66) and called his film Belfast ’71, no confusion would be possible. ArguablyWhat might a movie called ’71 be about? The Pentagon Papers? War between India and Pakistan? The release of Led Zeppelin’s untitled fourth album? Had director Yann Demange taken a cue from Vincent Gallo (Buffalo ’66) and called his film Belfast ’71, no confusion would be possible. Arguably the most violent year in the history of the Troubles, 1971 saw riots (in response to mass internment of nationalists by British security forces) that prompted thousands to flee Northern Ireland, and culminated with the December 4 bombing of McGurk’s Bar, which killed 15 people. Demange’s film, a work of fiction, doesn’t dramatize any of these specific events, but it captures, with harrowing intensity, the chaos and terror of the era, depicting a single night during which a particularly green British soldier gets separated from his unit in the Catholic part of Belfast—a foul-up that practically amounts to a death sentence.

The soldier in question, Gary Hook, is played by rising star Jack O’Connell, more in the survival mode of Unbroken than in the feral mode of Starred Up. Accompanying his new unit on a raid that was meant to be quick and surgical, Gary steps in the wrong direction when locals start not-so-passively resisting and winds up running for his life, unwittingly abandoned. (A fellow soldier also left behind is immediately killed by the IRA.) Plans are made to extract him, headed by his commanding officer, Lieutenant Armitage (Sam Reid). In the meantime, however, Gary has to rely on the kindness of strangers, each of whom could rat him out to the IRA at any moment. He’s also being fervently sought by the Military Reaction Force, a counter-insurgency unit of the British army (described by one former member as a “legalized death squad”) that’s concerned about what Gary may find out if he talks to the so-called enemy.

Having previously directed only shorts and TV episodes, Demange, who was born in France but has lived most of his life in England, makes an accomplished feature debut, though it augurs a future in gripping action movies rather than probing political dramas. From the moment that Gary is trapped behind “enemy lines” (in a war movie set entirely among residential streets, Liverpool doubles ably for Belfast) ’71 rarely stops for breath; the threat of sudden violence hangs over every mundane conversation, and Demange expertly sustains the tension, allowing anxiety to build, briefly ebb, and then build again, over and over. O’Connell, so savage in Starred Up, makes a superbly terrified and helpless “hero” (if that’s even the right word for someone who’s just trying to survive), and he’s surrounded by an equally agile cast of lesser-known actors, each of whom strives to achieve maximum ambiguity when it comes to the character’s true motives. Only in the film’s last third or so does it badly falter, embracing cheap cynicism that makes its conclusion feel aggressively facile rather than cathartic. The setting may be Belfast ’71, but Demange’s sensibility—first-rate suspense coupled with black-and-white politics—is much more James Cameron ’86.… Expand

0 of 0 users found this helpful00

geewah

Jan 17, 2021

A tense, well edited war movie that takes on the man left behind theme and does it brilliantly.

0 of 0 users found this helpful00

JeBjBo

Jan 10, 2023

A gripping war drama with a fantastic lead, Jack O'Donnell has great potential!

0 of 0 users found this helpful00

BHBarry

Mar 22, 2015

"’71" was written by Gregory Burke and directed by Yann Demange. It stars Jack O’Connell who portrays an accidentally abandoned British soldier during the conflict in Belfast and how he attempts to survive in this hostile Catholic environment as he tries to rejoin his regiment. More than"’71" was written by Gregory Burke and directed by Yann Demange. It stars Jack O’Connell who portrays an accidentally abandoned British soldier during the conflict in Belfast and how he attempts to survive in this hostile Catholic environment as he tries to rejoin his regiment. More than anything, the film seeks to examine the deep seeded hostility and social unrest among the British Catholics and the differences even amidst their own leaders and followers. Unfortunately, the film is weak in this regard and never stays with one character long enough to investigate and understand his or her`respective motivations and beliefs. The film is also burdened by the fact that the thick Irish brogues make it difficult to understand what the characters, especially the key ones, are saying. English titles certainly would have helped.. A loose script and difficulty in knowing who are and who aren’t the good guys makes this movie more of an effort to watch than to enjoy. I give the film a 6.0 rating for the one thing it does do is afford some insight into the circumstances that befell Belfast and how one British soldier spent a night there in the year 1971.… Expand

0 of 4 users found this helpful04

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