![]() Finbar passes his time by measuring his target shooting skills in a good-natured contest with local Garda officer Vinnie (Ciarán Hinds) or admiring the garden but declining the dinner invitations of his salt-of-the-earth neighbor, Rita (Niamh Cusack). The pub of course is the warm heart of the community, with fiddlers fiddling while customers enjoy a Guinness (Babycham for the ladies) and sometimes dance a jig. Neeson plays Finbar Murphy, who lives a quiet life in a quaint (they’re always quaint) village called Gleann Colm Cille. Cue rolling green landscapes, towering cliffs and spectacular coastal scenery, handsomely photographed by Tom Stern with lots of expansive wide shots and dramatic aerial views. Their deaths make it necessary for the IRA footsoldiers to lie low, heading all the way down south to County Donegal. The opening has Condon’s ruthless Doireann leading a small team carrying out a Belfast pub bombing, which doesn’t go quite according to plan when a mother and her three young schoolchildren passing by get caught in the fatal blast. It also, God help us, features a young hitman who dreams of making music in California: “People over there just seem free or somethin.’ Enjoyin’ life, you know what I mean?” This is a film in which a mortally wounded villain hauls off over a field to an old stone church dramatically perched on a hilltop, not so much looking for absolution as for an atmospheric place to die in the moody light of what seems like hundreds of flickering votive candles. ![]() Screenwriters: Mark Michael McNally, Terry Loane Venue: Venice Film Festival (Horizons Extra)Ĭast: Liam Neeson, Kerry Condon, Jack Gleeson, Colm Meaney, Ciarán Hinds, Desmond Eastwood, Sarah Greene, Niamh Cusack, Conor MacNeill, Seamus O’Hara, Valentine Olukoga, Mark O’Regan, Laura Hughes, Anne Brogan, Michelle Gleeson, Joe Gallagher, Conor Hamill, Tim Landers Kerry Condon as an IRA spitfire with a fondness for the C-word adds some interest, but this is overwritten, overripe and likely destined to be streaming fodder. Not since the merry blarney of Wild Mountain Thymehas a movie leaned so hard into Emerald Isle stereotypes, which makes it remarkable that Liam Neeson as a pipe-smoking, Dostoevsky-reading assassin manages to play it straight. The paddywhackery’s as thick as the Oirish brogues and flavorful caricatures in Robert Lorenz’s In the Land of Saints & Sinners, a deadly serious thriller about violence and redemption in which a local lush pauses to grab his pint as gunfire tears up the village pub.
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