| RATING: | 60% |
| FORMAT: | DVD |
Movie never takes the opportunities it gives itself to deal with the full complexity - both political and moral - of the issues it pretends to focus on. An absent wider context presents a version of events that could just as easily be culled from British government-censored BBC news-bulletins rather than one man’s actual experience.
Little more than anti-terrorist propaganda without any real sense of why people do what they do even though they commit acts that are as irrevocable as their commitment to committing them. Here, drama is reduced to mere events without any explanation to allow us to empathize with the characters and offer some kind of dramatic and psychological understanding. It does not present the PIRA as monsters, since that would clearly be unrealistic, but then neither does it do anything else. Yet oddly, the only people here who have a clear idea of what they are doing are the PIRA soldiers who are perfectly clear as to the civil rights’ struggle they are actually engaging in and wish to free themselves of through direct confrontation with the British.
Special Branch, the RUC and MI5 are presented as bloodthirsty emotionalists; caring nothing for wider political implications; simply seeing the dirty war in Northern Ireland as a chance to exercise their 007-standard by shooting Irishmen with impunity.
An unintegrated script, that refuses to humanize its characters, leaves the mostly mediocre actors all at sea; not helping them carry the emotional weight of the movie even if they had been better performers or had a better screenplay to work with. A lot of whizz-bang going nowhere; lacking content.
Only Ben KINGSLEY’s Special Branch officer shines as a man of conscience; developing an emotional relationship with the PIRA informer he handles. (Sadly, he is often to be seen in films like this that are nowhere near as good as he is.)
The saddest aspect of all this is that Western culture is largely unable to honestly analyze itself. If a war is fought anywhere else, dramatic presentations abound in explaining the origins of such conflict - as they have been, for example, concerning Al Qaeda. After all, understanding your enemy is the surest way of defeating them. But washing the laundry of this particular war in public is too close to home for British comfort. And too reminiscent of the fact that, no matter how much the West prides itself on being culturally-superior to the rest of the world, there are clear reminders in Northern Ireland that it is not.
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