In the Land of Saints and Sinners (2023)

The Republic of Ireland, 1973. Finbar Murphy (Liam Neeson) has killed for money from his boss Robert McQue (Colm Meaney) and/or a cause for decades now, but is really getting tired of the killing and what it does to him and the world. An encounter with a particularly dignified victim closes the deal for him, and he decides to retire. McQue isn’t going to make trouble for him, and they’ve both kept their dirty work as far away from their homes in County Donegal as possible, so there’s little danger for anyone in the retirement.

Why, Finbar is even buddies with the local Garda man, O’Shea (Ciarán Hinds). Of course, men like Finbar never can truly get away from their pasts, and when he realizes the visiting uncle of a neighbour who is also clearly an IRA member is abusing a little girl he’s friendly with, he decides to straight up murder the guy.

The killing itself doesn’t go quite as slick as Finbar hoped – youngsters carrying knives now is a new one to him –, but that’s not going to be his main problem. Rather, his victim wasn’t just some IRA guy with particularly bad manners on a visit, but actually part of a cell hiding out after a bombing that went a bit too well. Worse still, leader of the cell is Doireann (Kerry Condon), who just happens to be the sister of Finbar’s victim. Doireann, capable of switching from friendly to disturbingly violent at the drop of a hat, is not a woman who takes kindly to the disappearance of her brother.

There are of course quite a few clichés about 70s Ireland in Robert Lorenz’s In the Land and rather a lot of the standard tropes of the Neesonsploitation genre as well. However, Lorenz and the script by Mark Michael McNally and Terry Loane handle most of these clichés – let’s just ignore the subplot around a junior killer played by Jack Gleeson in that regard - with some wit and a degree of delicacy, taking a bit more care with the characters than about half of your typical Neeson outings from the last few decades have done – and of the next decade will do.

While he’s still better at the violence than a man of his age would be, the film goes out of its way to keep him in the realm of the human, an opening Neeson of course uses to do some actual acting. Neither his character nor his development are particularly deep, but they are complicated enough to be engaging. Specifically the contrast between the actual kindness and consideration Finbar shows other human beings and the trained efficiency with which he commits violence when on the job works very well indeed.

In this approach to violence, Finbar stands in marked contrast to Doireann, who does have sudden outbreaks of humanity – this is not a film about supervillains - but also tends to be more brutal than she needs to be, and very much makes the impression of enjoying what Finbar has come to loathe (and probably always treated more as a duty than a pleasure). Condon is really rather wonderful in the role, selling the transition between whatever the Irish female version of a Good Old Boy is to someone who’d cut your throat without a second thought and like it, while also keeping Doireann human and likeable enough to make me a little uncomfortable for wanting to like her.

Three Films Make A Post: A Rian Johnson Whodunit.

RRR (2022): It’s a little wonder the kind of mainstream critics who’d usually spit on an Indian mainstream movies the same way as they do on a Marvel flick seem to have seen the light for S.S. Rajamouli’s latest. It’s probably the cartoonish (yet certainly not un-earned) anti-colonialism, whose treatment of Big, Serious Themes is just as enthusiastically maximalist as everything else in the movie, be it manly friendship or turning historical figures into the mythical equivalent of superheroes. The musical numbers (apart from the flag-waving post-movie sequence that really takes things too far in the nationalist direction for my tastes) are awesome (in all meanings of the word), as are the fights scenes, the melodrama, the CGI (realism can shut it),  and the oversized personalities. If this doesn’t grab you already simply by the virtue of being EVERYTHING at its loudest, but also most charming, then just look at how Rajamouli paces this thing, as if a three hour runtime weren’t a marathon but a damn sprint he – clearly as heroically made as his characters – can keep up for so long without even the slightest of efforts.

Glass Onion (2022): Full disclosure: I don’t actually like Knives Out, despite my huge admiration for everything else Rian Johnson has made. I found it unpleasantly smug in the way certain parts of the “progressive” side of US politics can look from over here (where their reactionary counterparts simply tend to look like fascist assholes), and wasn’t impressed by it never giving a character a second dimension if one was available. This one here, with the same basic politics, does everything right, grounding snarky politics in actual characterisation and much more complex relationships, which does tend to make one’s politics much more convincing. All the while, the film keeps the ease with which Johnson has always juggled plot, humour and a sharp visual eye. The cast is doing fantastic work as well. Hell, even Daniel Craig has toned down his “Southern” accent from rage-inducingly obnoxious to terrible (which is of course the traditional note the detective in a Christie-style traditional murder mystery has to hit).

The Banshees of Inisherin (2022): This tragical comedy about the end of friendship, boredom, depression, places and people that drag everyone in and around them down, as well as the one woman who gets the hell away by Martin McDonagh is the wonder everyone says it is. Funny and sad at the same moment, this shows what are foibles in most of us turn big and toxic in its characters, self-destructive and violent in ways that are grotesque when you think about them but also feel completely natural and logical.

In McDonagh’s usual style, there’s much space left for the actors –particularly of course Kerry Condon, Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson – where lesser films aiming where McDonagh does might bury them under mawkish or too knowing dialogue.