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| Directed by John Boorman; Starring Brendan Gleeson, Adrian Dunbar, Sean McGinley, Maria Doyle Kennedy, Angeline Ball, Jon Voight, Eanna MacLiam, Tom Murphy, Paul Hickey, Tommy O’Neal, and Eamonn Owens |
Finally! A good film. I have set through The King and I, Wing Commander, and Baby Geniuses waiting to find something good (the last above B- Rating was for Hurlyburly on 27 February). You don’t know how dismal things can be when there haven’t been watchable films for so long.
I guess I should probably get off of my problems and on to the movie at hand. The General is the latest from one-time auteur John Boorman. Boorman’s best known as the only man that can come off of Deliverance with The Exorcist II: The Heretic. The last time I really liked a Boorman film was with Hope and Glory in 1987. Like Hope and Glory, The General is set in the United Kingdom, far away from the Georgia back-waters that made him so famous. It is the story of Martin Cahill, the famous criminal in Northern Ireland that attempted to defy both the law and the IRA. The film starts off with his assassination and builds back to his childhood days (young Cahill is played by the highly talented Eammon Owens who last appeared in Neil Jordan’s The Butcher Boy).
Instead of attempting to be a stiff-suited biographical drama, The General goes for many, many laughs at the expense of normal decency (they even play his death backwards at the beginning for a few laughs). All in all, I found it to be the most fun I’ve had in a theatre since the lesbian kiss in Crual Intentions (Blair and Gellar should get some award for that). The cast is superb including Voight as the cheif of police and Gleeson as Cahill. Boorman takes some risky moves on screen annd most of them work out. My only problem with the film is that the film has one too many heists. It over steps a little in length and has a slight falling for it. Other wise it is the best first time viewing I’ve had since Affliction (Rushmore was the day before).
