First of all I should say that after my initial reservations about the inclusion of Jim Sturgess in the cast of this thriller about a man infiltrating the IRA for the British, I'm pleased to report that he passes with flying colours. Aside from making a decent job of the accent (though I'm sure there are some decent Irish actors out there... but let's not get into that again) he does manage a strong performance, which is just as well given that his leading role as Martin McGartland pretty much carries the film.
The rest of the cast are a mixed bunch however, the biggest offenders being Rose McGowan - for no bigger reasons than it seems her tiny role is only there to bring some Hollywood glamour - and Ben Kingsley. The veteran thesp spends a great deal of the film being rather stiff and emotionless and it's not until the endgame really kicks in that we begin to see signs of a human being underneath the northern accent and war-inspired quotable soundbites.
There are more troubles in this film than just a couple of dodgy casting decisions however. Within the story itself, you have the problem that the structure is too repetitive for a two-hour film - McGartland gets promoted, McGartland grasses to the Brits, the operation is stopped, then somehow McGartland gets promoted again, and so on. The other issue is that the film is upfront about having taken liberties with the truth, noting immediately that characters and events have been changed. It could be a brave and honest admission by the filmmakers (it's not something that many other "true" story films have said) but on the other hand it robs the film of a great deal of its power when the viewer is left wondering how much of what's on screen is genuinely true.
While the repetition is undoubtedly a flaw of the screenplay - and perhaps the original book too, I've never read it - but the director, Kari Skogland has to take a fair share of the blame for the film's other flaws.
I don't know how much Skogland knows about the trouble in Ireland, but the general assumption seems to be that the audience knows nothing. A heavy-handed voice-over (from Kingsley) spells out every little detail of the conflict. I've read a bit more about it than Joe Public but I'm no expert, yet I still felt like I was being lectured to though. On top of that, we also get captions detailing who everyone is, which might seem like a good idea to the uninitiated but the story unfolds in such a way that you really don't need to be told in order to figure out that, yes, that guy's a head honcho in British intelligence or, yep, he's definitely high up in the IRA.
Perhaps the biggest offender of all in this category is the decision to also offer up captions explaining who Gerry Adams and Ian Paisley are. Even ignoring the fact that they're pretty famous anyway, they appear in archive footage for all of a few seconds each during which time there's really no need to be told who they are anyway.
My biggest gripe however - yep, there's more - is with the director's decision to throw pretty much every trick in the book at the screen, as if somehow being really flashy and technically showing off will somehow make us ignore the fact that the story is so repetitive. The end result is a film that has no look of its own, only several looks clashing with each other to the point where it seems like half a dozen different directors could have been working on the film.
One minute the screen is practically bleached into whiteout, the next its flooded with fifty different shades of orange; we go from the drab grey pallor of a Clint Eastwood film to the aftermath of a bomb blast which is lit up with so many colours it's like an outtake from SUSPIRIA. On top of all that we get the jaunty camera angles, various uses of slow-motion, a layered-imagery montage as McGartland walks the streets. We even jump, in the action-packed finale - from what appears to have been film stock for most of the film to suddenly very obviously being shot on video (digital or otherwise - I'm no expert, but the change is certainly obvious).
For all my grumbles there's still a decent thriller in here. Sturgess, as mentioned, is excellent, there's the core of an enthralling story, some well-executed action sequences and some real tension on more than one occasion. Unfortunately the decision to spend more time and money making the film look flash than fleshing out the script means that a good, diverting two hours falls some way short of being excellent.
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