Kill the Irishman, Jonathan Hensleigh. Anchor Bay Films, 2011. 106 min.
Summer 1976 was not a pleasant time to be a resident of Cleveland, Ohio. Throughout the months, a series of 36 car bombs traumatized the city. These deaths capped a street war between the city’s long-influential Italian mafia and an Irishman seeking to break the power of the city’s criminal organizations. At that time, the struggles of Danny Greene, progeny of the Emerald Isle, received national attention, along with the focus of a book written by the city’s chief of police. Thirty-five years later, the narrative has hit the screen in the form of Kill the Irishman.
Though Greene’s story captivated contemporary audiences, the film adaptation ultimately lacks emotional residence. Greene committed his crimes just six years after Coppola’s Godfather, yet in the years following, the Godfather’s spiritual successors have covered nearly every permutation of the genre. Whether Val Kilmer’s opening monologue—interestingly, both he and Danny Greene came from the same neighborhood—or the film’s supporting cast—one that must have felt permanently displaced after The Sopranos finale – nothing stands out from anything one might see in Goodfellas or The Departed. The film’s single distinguishing characteristic remains the sheer number of car bombs, with which the movie begins, ends, and even includes a montage. Such is not to say that innovative directors cannot find fertile ground in the true crime genre; Lock, Stock, and Smoking Barrels comes to mind. Yet Kill the Irishman lacks a necessary foresight, mashing together Coppola’s authentic techniques and alternating in mood, meaning, and quality. The final feature proves confusingly jumbled. It significantly underwhelms.
Two Films Diverging
The film’s deficiencies first lie with its director. Throughout Kill the Irishman, Hensleigh never seems to decide what his movie is supposed to be. At first, the film seems promising in its pretensions towards a slick action thriller: a relentless stream of adrenaline and violence, in which its characters kill to the beat of an unmistakably Irish theme song. However, Hensleigh splices action with more-than-subtle plot turns in which the music suddenly stops and the film’s tone undergoes a stark change. Slowed down, Kill the Irishman becomes an almost meditative work, a gritty, narrative exploration of hard-earned status and the American dream, focused on Danny Greene’s inner psychology. These changes in tone are never particularly jarring per se, but they accumulate to the point of discomfort. In the end, neither side of the film receives full treatment, leaving Kill the Irishman more detached than its on-target counterparts, such as The Boondock Saints and The Departed.
Hensleigh’s indecision paralyzes his treatment of Danny Greene (Ray Stevenson), a character developed into a set of misguided contradictions. At times Greene is a ruthless killer, at others, a victim of circumstance. He evolves into both an excessively brutal, power-hungry criminal, but also the working man’s hero. Reckless and ignorant of his family, he’s devoted enough to his love to nearly elope with her. Many of these contradictions are perhaps inherent to Greene’s character. The real Greene was once arrested for grand larceny, only to gain the label of the “Robin Hood of Cleveland.” Hensleigh never provides the necessary insights to explain away the apparent dichotomy.
To be sure, a large part of the gangster genre rests on precisely such intellectual dexterity, or even sustained hypocrisy; Michael Corleone claims to care for his family, and remains no less ruthless for that fact. Yet while Stevenson portrays Greene adequately well, the actor ultimately lacks the necessary charisma to overcome the apparent divisions in his character’s persona. Perhaps the worst example of the phenomenon arrives at the end, when Hensleigh seems to want to turn Greene into martyr-figure. Yet Stevenson plays the part with little of the moral ambiguity once anticipated by the film’s meaning. Every character in Kill the Irishman either celebrates Danny Greene or tries to kill the man for being a rebel, but nothing in the film or in the character drives the audience to these emotional extremes.
Dialogue for Dummies
Greene, though, is only one of many examples of the script’s underdevelopment. The supporting characters do little to either entertain or forward the plot. Christopher Walken, a rare highlight, steals the screen in his first appearance, yet the movie squanders him as a plot device for the remainder of the running-time. Oversimplified dialogue, Hensleigh’s attempt to remain consistent with the characters, too often descends into either obvious plot reminders or genre clichés. “There’s no good in me,” Greene ruminates.
As a case in point, take Greene’s romantic interactions. The first romantic scene starts passably with semi-witty, if not completely original, flirting. Yet it all goes downhill quickly, complete with annoyingly trite dialogue (“I heard you’re dangerous”) and action (a symbolic Irish ring for a gift? Really?). It’s not so much that character chemistry never solidifies as that the concept of mutual attraction never seems to have occurred the production. At best, the romance feels forced; at worst, a fact more often than one would hope, the scenes feel painfully awkward. Even the theme of love itself suffers. At first, Greene’s relationships seem like a background element of his character, a part of his life irrelevant to the plot. In the second half of the film this changes: romantic scenes become more prominent, and the implausibility of the characters’ actual attraction becomes glaringly obvious. Feelings are rushed, emotions seem spontaneous, and the scenes simply bore.
A Stranded Film
Most significant, Kill the Irishman is a thematic jumble, creating troves of loose stranded motifs, from the criminally violent implications of the American dream to the figure of Danny Greene as role model. Nothing develops. Once-intriguing mysteries fall flat, lost amidst the explosions and cronyism that dominate the rest of the work. As a result, the film loses its meaning. The dramatic power that drives gangster classics is illusory, as the writers and directors try to distract the audience with explosions of a quantity more appropriate for Michael Bay.
For all this, the film isn’t entirely bad; it stands out precisely for its mediocrity. Other than a few clichés, awkward scenes, or poorly constructed lines, nothing is particularly terrible. The film, in short, is the antithesis of Greene, who instigated a flood of violence and left 27 mob bosses in his wake. Kill the Irishman is the kind of movie that seems destined for late-night HBO counterprogramming Law & Order reruns. Unless, of course, one likes exploding cars.
Raúl Quintana ‘14 is the Books & Arts Blog Editor.