Devil's Own
Directed by Alan Pakula
With Brad Pitt, Harrison Ford, Margaret Colin, Treat Williams

Review by Sean Healy

When I first saw the shorts for this film, I thought, "Oh no, another Hollywood anti-republican film" and was sharpening my pen to write a "Let's set the record straight" review. The vision I had was something like Patriot Games where Harrison Ford fights for good against the evil IRA "godfathers of crime".

But I was in for a surprise. This is one of the most sympathetic representations of the republican cause I've seen in a long time. Forget the callous gunmen in the Crying Game, forget the guerilla-turned-hit man in A Prayer for the Dying, forget even the republican prisoner setting fire to the prison guard in In the Name of the Father.

The film focuses on an IRA guerilla, Frankie (played with not a bad Irish accent by Brad Pitt), who travels to New York to buy a shipment of surface-to-air missiles. There, he stays with Tom, an honest New York cop (do such creatures exist?), played by Harrison Ford.

True, it's really little more than a Hollywood action film. True, you can guess the ending before you take your seat. But nevertheless after countless films which just mouth the British government line on Ireland, this film comes as a relief.

For one, this film actually gives the motivation for why the central character joins the IRA -- in the opening scene a loyalist gunman shoots his father in front of eight-year-old Frankie. This is rare in itself.

Even rarer is the impression given of the British government -- not a particularly good one. The Crown forces are represented by a suave but murderous SAS commander, who kills Frankie's comrades and then goes after him. In the second scene, the SAS and the military collude with the loyalist paramilitaries to launch an ambush.

This impression is carried further later in the film as the characters develop and as the SAS commander reaches New York. Frankie confesses to Tom that his father was killed by an assassin. "Did they catch the fuckers?", Tom naively asks. "They are the fuckers", comes the reply.

The film is not without its flaws -- it's a Hollywood movie after all. The message is a hackneyed one: the tragedy of the Irish, fated to suffer, fated to lose. And there's the inevitable "love interest", which is saccharine sweet and very hard to swallow.

The most interesting question, though, is why the movie was made. Given the anti-British sentiment, Colombia Pictures has obviously made a call that the Irish-American market is big enough and rich enough to have a film tailored specifically for its appetites.

This article was posted on the Green Left Weekly Home Page.
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