4/10
A shaggy dog story of a film that takes place over a day and a night in Dublin. Cillian Murphy owes Brendan Gleeson money, and if he doesn't pay up, he gets to choose which bones are broken. The success of In Bruges has upped the stakes on Irish gangster movies, but this one doesn't have a fraction of the wit and charm of its predecessor. A series of events take place - mainly involving violence - but there seems no particular rhyme or reason for them, nor any consequences.
For example, at one point, the three main characters shelter from the rain in a barn. The farmer's wife screams at them to go away, and when they don't she reappears and says she'll call the police, and that she'll tell them they tried to rape her, proceeding to rip her clothes as she does so. They run away, but have a quarrel; one of them goes in another direction and is caught by the police. So they hold up the police at gunpoint, steal the car and drive off. The scene has no bearing on the rest of the film, nor do the police ever make any effort to track them down. It's as if the scriptwriter just had a few ideas of individual scenes and string them together any old how. The main purpose of each scene seeming to be to propel us to the next.
The cast is strong enough, with Murphy as the hapless and hopeless debtor in danger of bone-crushing, Jim Broadbent as his peculiar father, convinced that if he falls asleep, he'll die, and Gleeson as the chief thug who alternates between empathy and extreme violence. It's not that it's a bad film, it 's just not very good, and I can't imagine who'd be interested in going to see it.
