Perrier's Bounty (2010)

Casting and the dynamic between characters can make a movie flop or fly. Perrier's Bounty is smart and funny, though not shatteringly original; many comparisons have been made with the dark and distinctly Irish humour of In Bruges. Inept and slightly rubbish protagonist finds himself, through a perfect demonstration of his ineptitude and rubbishness, pitted against roundly awful rotters and thugs, and beset from all sides by pain and inconvenience, while a funny script and a generous splash of eccentricity and heartwarming romance with a girl way out of our dopey hero's league keep you hoping for a happy ending, however undeserved. This is also, broadly, the setup of True Romance. People like to tell the same stories repeatedly, just like they like to read and watch them over and over again. Not because we expect it to turn out differently; just because we like how some stories feel.Here's Brendon Gleeson back again in an wholly different role to his In Bruges turn, joyous as as solidly horrible gangster Perrier; unkind to animals, worse to people. Cillian Murphy has said before he likes playing characters who are under pressure, and is, as ever, excellent as the ordinary, unlucky bloke by turns incredulous and incandescently cheesed off with the hand life keeps dealing him. And Jim Broadbent - in the wake of Peter O'Toole (may all the gods rest his venerable soul), does anyone mix matter-of-fact and completely barmy better?We know the core actors are great at what they do, and they carry the film along reliably.What's great about this movie is the detail, the gleaming dialogue, and the real story at the heart of this; the father and son, estranged and reunited in ludicrous circumstances, and the family ties slowly revealed to us. Broadbent and Murphy are perfect together, the exasperation of the son pitched brilliantly against the patience and downright bizarreness of the father. Hurrah also for the supporting turn from Brendan Coyle, who's always a joy to watch.Perrier's Bounty isn't a new tale; but it's lyrical, funny, dark, human and absolutely charming.

When his plans to pay back a €1,000 debt go awry, scruffy criminal Cillian Murphy, the girl he loves (Jodie Whittaker) and his dying dad (Jim Broadbent) have to stay one step ahead of Brendan Gleeson's goons, who want to lop off his willy and put it up his bottom. Given the cast, this crime-comedy is a big disappointment, with a poor, mannered script of the type currently entrancing the Irish Film Board: a torrent of swearing and a show-off's vocabulary intending to compensate for a complete absence of anything to say. Man. Sorry, everyone in the film says "Man" all the time, like it's 1967 (or Manchester in 1998). Films like Brick really did create their own vernacular; this isn't how you do that. The movie is also saturated in the kind of obvious post-modern irony of which The Guard was sometimes guilty. Gleeson gives an excellent performance and Murphy and Broadbent are both quite good, but it's a smug and unsatisfying film, the agreeable invention of parts of the plotting and a handful of nice lines obliterated by a blizzard of bull faeces and a climactic death scene that is a new kind of rubbish. Perrier's Bounty sounds like a two- for-one at WHSmith. That it's actually less inspiring than that is probably a criticism.

" Perrier's Bounty", charming little caper had more potential then result. Dark, off-beat comedy or thriller ( depends on the outlook), has a lot of promise, but , unfortunately, delivers way less than expected. Grant it, it has an interesting idea, quirky direction, exceptional cast filled with marvelous British actors. But... the movie is little too self-involved and quite a lot in love with itself. In effort to be original and unique, it just went too far. We have viscous dogs and gay gangsters and love interest and the estranged parents, and much more of the same, perhaps original, but nevertheless messy and illogical details. It distracted itself from the main purpose, to tell a story.

This is an urban Irish crime-comedy, so between the slang and the sort of accents where Michael is pronounced MOY-cul, I'm sure I missed some of the subtleties of Perrier's Bounty. I think I got the gist of it, though, and what I understood was pretty good. I'm not sure if the cavalcade of colorful characters who sprint through this tight but sparse little story are reflective of true Irish self-image or if they're playing to the prejudices of cinema tourists. Either way, they're a fun group with which to spend a fast hour and a half.Michael (Cillian Murphy) is a low-level denizen of Ireland's criminal underworld, which isn't so much under anything as sort of off to the side and behind the local pub. I always love how British films treat crime as though it was just another vocation. American thieves and killers are always cast as outlaws. With the Brits, it's like some people simply grow up to be gangsters the way others grow up to be mechanics or butchers or meter maids. It gives their crime stories a refreshing workaday sensibility.Anyway, Michael owes a thousand Euro to his local crime boss, Perrier (Brendan Gleeson). He doesn't have it and faces the prospect of two broken bones if he can't come up with it in a few hours. Michael's also got to deal with the girl he clearly loves (Jodie Whittaker) getting strung along by her douchebag boyfriend. Then his estranged "Da", that's "Dad" to us Yanks, shows up in what appears to be one of Don Johnson's Miami Vice outfits after it's been dipped in ink and proclaims that he's dying. As if that's not enough, when Perrier's thugs come to collect, one of them winds up dead and that means Michael is facing a lot worse that a couple of fractures. With a 10,000 Euro bounty on one side, his melancholy but surprisingly violent father on another, his unspoken love's heartbreak on a third side and an unresolved conflict with his mother on a fourth, Michael is boxed in and needs a hell of a lot of Irish luck to get out alive.About the only complaint I have with this movie is that the character of Perrier, though ably brought to life by Brendan Gleeson, never lives up to his advance billing. He's repeatedly referred to and built up in the viewer's mind. Then as soon as he shows up on screen, the character is sidetracked into this homosexual tolerance digression that's amusing at first but just becomes puzzling as it goes on and on. I can appreciate the dramatic logic of leading the audience's expectations in one direction and then going a different way, but the character of Perrier is left stumbling out of the gate and never finds his footing. This story needed a great comic but still threatening villain and Perrier's personality and agenda never congeal enough to make him that. There are too many times when Perrier is put in service to the Almighty Plot Hammer to make him a real enough antagonist for Michael.As for everything else, it's a delight. Jim Broadbent is particularly good as an irresolute old dude forced into action by his looming mortality and there's a pleasant depth to the relationship between Michael and his father. You can feel the layers of history between them in their dialog and you can see in their behavior how the two are similar and how they're separate. There are also quite a few funny lines, though frequently a bit hard to decipher, honestly humorous situations and even some gratuitous nudity. And while this isn't an intricate plot, there are more than enough times when it heads in an unexpected direction to keep you glued to what's going on.Perrier's Bounty is a clever and energetic piece of entertainment. If I could have figured out everything that was said, I probably would have liked it even more.