Movies This article is more than 11 months oldReviewThe Irish Mob review – cat and mouse with the gardaí in knock-off gangster flick
This article is more than 11 months oldThere are sloppy geezerisms, flat-pack tough talk and an overexplaining narration that kneecaps the tension in Patrick McKnight’s dud crime thriller
‘How someone can inflict such sadistic brutality on another is beyond me.” So says Dublin ganglord Valentino “Val” Fagan (Rob McCarthy) when one of his underlings is raped – but it’s rich coming from someone seen executing his own men, dousing innocent security personnel in petrol and slapping his wife. But Patrick McKnight’s crime thriller isn’t overburdened in the self-awareness department – it’s too busy trying to romanticise the Irish capital as a tempestuous urban battlefield of cops and robbers. But with its flat-pack tough talk and wine bar decor, it winds up more like a Premier Inn-grade travesty of Heat.
Val is in a spot of bother: his Amsterdam partners, the Corrigan brothers, have lost a large transatlantic drug shipment, so they are rattling the can among their associates to buy in an even bigger one. Asked to pony up €1m, Val asks right-hand man Renno (Liam Griffin) to come up with a way to bust into a secure facility holding stacks of ATM cash. But the gardaí, led by DI Delahunt (Pauline O’Driscoll), have already got the crazy wall mapping his outfit and are working their way to the top, beginning with one of Val’s street-level goons.
McCarthy – with a curl in his lip and a morbid eye – has undeniable presence and the panoramic setup is ambitious. So it’s a shame writer-director McKnight insists on peddling knock-off gangster-flick staples left, right and centre; Val’s chilly, overexplaining narration ends up kneecapping much of the tension. Neither the police operation nor the feebly etched gallery of hoodlums generate enough hubris to have us braced for the fall of the Fagan empire. Without it, there’s little more than sloppy geezerisms that should have stayed in the 90s with the likes of rap-rock and FHM magazine. “Like taking candy from a fucking baby!” If only good crime cinema were that simple.
The Irish Mob is available on digital platforms on 13 March.
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