Kill the Irishman (2011)

This quirky little film is a robust contribution to the popular and well established '**** me the Irish are a bunch of bastards, let's kick the crap out of them' genre. A young Irishman with a talent for corruption, violence, and gangland killings sets about carving a place for himself in the seedy filth of the Cleveland underworld. When captured by the FBI he sells out his friends and colleagues to become an informant, and exploits this position to advance his criminal career.Set in the 1970s at the height of the infamous 'Mafia versus pretty much anyone who's not Italian' wars, this action packed film based on real life events has a star studded cast, including Ray Stevenson, Val Kilmer, Christopher Walken, Fionnula Flanagan, and Michael Finn Seamus McDonnell O'Flahahaherty.I rate Kill the Irishman at 26.64 on the Haglee Scale, which works out as an impressive 8/10 on IMDb.

I absolutely loved Ray Stevenson in the HBO Series ROME, where he played a Roman soldier named Titus Pullo. Pullo was the original tough guy with a heart of gold, a guy who could be breaking skulls one minute and playing with children the next, and never be anything less than real and sympathetic.So when I watched KILL THE IRISHMAN, I was expecting Ray Stevenson to really shine. Yet I was disappointed, because Danny Greene is really not a lovable tough guy. He's more like a driven psycho who kills over and over, not because he's cornered, or even because he wants a bigger piece of the pie, but just because he has some messianic delusion that only he can "save" the city of Cleveland from the Italian mob. This is all very interesting, (the Irish tendency not so much towards violence itself, but suicidal religious fanaticism) yet the character is so cold and almost fanatical that Ray Stevenson can't really get a grip. And yes, this is the only movie I've ever seen where the leading man's hair is so stringy, lifeless and weird looking that it's fall down laughing funny.Meanwhile, the movie hits you over the head with comic stupidity at every turn, so what should be a tense mob thriller becomes almost like a dark comedy. The characters all live in the Seventies, drive Fifties cars and have Sixties haircuts. The soundtrack see-saws back and forth in a zany sort of way between comically upbeat Irish jigs (when someone's getting beaten to death or blown up) and generic Philadelphia-style Soul Music (whenever someone's driving in his car.)There are so many things that make no sense. Danny Greene is supposed to be tough, okay. Smart, okay. But everyone else is just plain dumb. Early in the picture, a big goon wearing glasses pulls a gun on him, and Danny just says, "hey now. Put it down." So the guy does. Then Danny beats him up and kills him! Good thing he thought of telling the bad guy to put the gun down, huh? Is that all it takes in Cleveland? A guy with a genuinely crazy persona, like Mel Gibson, might have made you believe this guy is nuts and even tough guys are afraid of him. It's funny, everyone says this movie is a bad version GOODFELLAS, but it reminded me much more of PAYBACK starring Mel Gibson. And TERROR AT RED WOLF INN, because it's so bad it's funny.

This is a truly awful film from 2011 that you would think was made for TV in 1990. Such bad acting and dumb looks from the lead roll, you wonder how he ever got the gig. This film throws well know actors from many much better classic gangster films in extremely typecast rolls, to the point of you start to wonder who else the director has dug out from the woodwork to pop up during the film. But even they can not save this disaster of a movie. It reminded me of the Comic Strip film 'Strike' ... But for the wrong reasons.How on earth this film has the rating it does on here makes me think long and hard about how the reviews are put together on here.

The first thing that struck me was the absolute expressionlessness in the faces of all the actors. The acting consists of stonefaced men past their middle age delivering lines unconvincingly. Normally, the director will try to enhance the visuals, add effectful sounds, and cut it in such a way as to cover up bad acting. But here, Nick Love seems to be completely uninterested in doing anything else than taking the footage as is and telling the story from beginning to end in the most plain and dull way imaginable.Every scene is dull and unconvincing. And despite a cast that looks good on paper, no scene has any nerve or energy. Even the violence/action scenes are dull and unconvincing. Usually, directors going crazy in this department can at least appeal to that part of the audience.If you're a fan of these actors, you might be let down. I would go get one of the many good movies they've starred in instead. This movie is dead dull.