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Reviews of Recent Independent, Foreign, & Documentary Films in Theaters and DVD/Home Video
KILL THE IRISHMAN American gangster movies can never, it seems, escape from the orbit of GoodFellas. The 1990 Martin Scorsese hit created the recipe for the last 20 years of mobster movies with its portrayal of a criminal as a rolling landscape: his rise, fall, rise again, and final fall. All you need to add is some period detail, macho camaraderie, and montages of party scenes and payback killings, set to contemporary tunes. Kill the Irishman is no exception to any of these rules. Directed and co-written by Jonathan Hensleigh (Armageddon and Jumanji scribe/perpetrator), it follows Danny Greene (Ray Stevenson) as he goes from laborer to union boss back down to hired muscle, up again to gang leader, and then at the end, bomb victim. And just in time for Saint Patrick’s Day, the whole package is oiled with greasy helpings of Irish-American sentimentality. As for the bombing, don’t worry: I spoiled nothing Wikipedia won’t tell you. (They’ll even show you a blurry black-and-white photo of Greene’s blown-up corpse.) He was a real guy whose turf war with the Italian mob in Cleveland in the late 1970s turned it into “Bomb City, USA.” The beginning promises much. There’s a crackling early scene where Greene slaps around a crooked union boss while daring him to draw a pistol. (“Yank it!”) Its raw, pulpy violence brings to mind an old Samuel Fuller flick, corny but delicious. And Stevenson (who played the comic book vigilante in the vastly underrated—I’m serious!—Punisher: War Zone) is a hefty, lumbering, long-limbed fellow. His screen presence put me in mind of Robert Ryan, whose body was similarly big, graceful, and goofy, even if his talent does not. The look on Stevenson’s face when he hears an off-screen explosion that kills a close friend should be put on YouTube for its lulz potential. Kill is often fun, mostly because of its great cast, an assembly of tough guy character actors. Vincent D’Onofrio is especially charming as a chummy but casually brutal mob boss whom Greene links his fortunes with. Christopher Walken, as a doomed loan shark, is weirdly touching. Like the actor, he’s aging, and reminisces about better days. And Val Kilmer, playing a cop and Greene’s old school chum, provides the voiceover necessary to link the plot’s many jumps in time. Of course, the mob is a boy’s club. The two women in Greene’s life, his wife (Linda Cardellini)—a movie creation, at first implausibly naïve about Greene’s criminal activity and then implausibly self-righteous about it—and a young grocer he hooks up with (Laura Ramsey) are very pretty and very disposable. But what really holds Kill the Irishman down is the thick heapings of Hibernian self-pity. This is true whenever Fionnula Flanagan’s old-country neighbor is onscreen. “There’s a bit o’ good in every Oirishman,” she says. Oh, please. (Perhaps All Irishmen Go to Heaven would have been a better title.) Like last year’s All Good Things, also based on a real-life crime, Kill takes a fascinating bit of history—the life and death of the Cleveland mob—and renders it into a predictable piece of cinema. You almost suspect the filmmakers had an inkling of this. They include footage of contemporary broadcasts (including one with a clumsily inserted Stevenson, a la Forrest Gump) as though they guiltily acknowledge they should have been making a documentary instead.
One curious recent gangster movie trend Kill does hold up is its
depiction of the frank, racial badinage among White ethnic criminals.
The Irish, Polish, and Italian hoods all call each other words that
would get you fired from your job. It is, sadly, I think, a new escapist
element of these films. While older audiences went to Scarface to
watch Al Pacino (or heck, Paul Muni) shoot folks and snort mountains of
cocaine, we get our transgressive kicks hearing ethnic slurs.
Brendon Nafziger
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