by Julian Wood
Worth: $13.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Christopher Eccleston, Madeleine Madden, Amy Molloy, Ciaran Dowd
Intro:
It wants to be Waking Ned Devine meets The Long Good Friday, but it can’t quite pull off this heist.
These days, when movies are claiming to be based on real events, they often have to get cute by saying something like – the real events are unreal and true, or the unreal bits could have been true etc. This is the case with this gentle bank heist movie. It is set in Ireland (Northern Ireland to be precise), but the film is an Irish-Australian co-pro and the cast re partly Australian.
So, what about the events? Well, there was this bank in Belfast – The Northern Bank – which had been acquired by National Australia Bank (hence the Aussie angle). The story is located in the early 2000s only a few short years after the ‘troubles’ when the paramilitaries adopted guerilla war tactics against the colonial British powers, and the Catholics and the Protestants still hate each other in a ‘never let a good grudge go to waste’ kind of way.
When three enterprising crooks rob the bank (without any violence it should be added), the lead cop Crayford (played with a flawless Ulster accent by Christopher Eccleston) immediately suspects the IRA. So does everyone else by the way, as only the IRA could do it with this military precision. Rookie Aussie cop Diana (Madeleine Madden) happens to be in Belfast at the time tracing her ancestry. She sees the chance to make a name for herself by muscling in on the investigation. The Irish cops, and Crayford in particular, are irritated by her, and, of course, she is assigned to work with him. So, we have the familiar trope of two reluctantly-paired cops with a clash of styles. No prizes for guessing the arc of that part of the story.
The film as a whole is a tad predictable and less fun than it promises to be. The Irish humour (very dry despite the soggy setting) adds something, but more could have been made of the sense of place. There is chemistry between Madden and Eccleston who are both good, but the pacing is off. Too many scenes seem either too short or too long, and the police procedures are hard to make engaging. There is a crazy twist (which, once again, was supposedly real) but it’s not quite enough to save the film. It wants to be Waking Ned Devine meets The Long Good Friday, but it can’t quite pull off this heist.
