Poor research, poor characterisation, poor direction, not a good film

Rating: 1/10 (12 January 2007)

Filmed against painted backdrops, many of the characters seemed painted too. The cheerful, brave rebels and the brutal, mindless British occupiers.
An English landowner and a young rebel who had betrayed his comrades are both executed on an exposed hillside in full view of a road. In an even more risible scene, an armed flying column are shown marching through the mist, singing loudly. Presumably to advertise their presence to the local garrison. Later, whilst laying an ambush, the column communicate by hand signals until their quarry are within earshot, when they start shouting. Nevertheless, the professional soldiers are taken by surprise and all killed. Their armaments are then collected, which makes the next scene , in which the column "Haven't a bullet between them" to defend their leaders home, leaving his girlfriend to the mercy of the enemy, wholly inexplicable.
The truce and 'post treaty' period are covered with no mention of the overwhelming popular support for the treaty, and in one scene , one of the central characters claims the time he spent at Frongoch POW camp to have been "the best years of my life" despite the fact that no prisoner spent more than nine months at Frongoch.
In the hands of a better director and a more conscientious writer this could have been a very good film.
Sadly, it was not.